A Civil War tragedy — how many Confederates fought for the financial well-being of a wealthy elite. And they still are!!
I wish I could speak to the man calling himself Rebel Rich who is quoted in a New York Times article as seeing no reason to mention slavery at the Virginia Monument at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:
“That statue is here to represent where Lee stood when he watched 12,500 men cross that field,” said the re-enactor, who wore a battle uniform and carried a Confederate flag. “When those young boys crossed that field, they didn’t know anything about the slavery part. They were fighting for their land rights.”
Rich is absolutely right — the majority of Southerners at the time of the Civil War were not slave owners. (Only 31% of Southerners owned any slaves.) Many Southerners were middlin’ to poor farmers eking out a living on poor or rocky soil or on small mountainous properties in East Tennessee, North Georgia, West Carolina. Their lives had nothing to do with the wealthy plantation owners who lived in large beautiful homes on hundreds or thousands of acres and who required scores of slaves to pick cotton or grow tobacco or manufacture Indigo. Slaves supported and maintained the wealthy life styles of these plantation owners. And the Civil War was fought for their benefit.
In other words, many young men were persuaded to leave their hardscrabble homes and give up their lives for a cause that wasn’t really theirs. They had been drawn into this terrible battle on the basis of a mythology about the preservation of State Rights. Yet, it wasn’t state rights that was under attack by the North, it was slavery.
What’s most tragic about this lie — is that it’s still being perpetuated. And it’s still being defended by those who have the least stake in its perpetuation. During reconstruction and during Jim Crow — the lie was not only perpetuated — it was enhanced and elaborated on. Most Civil War monuments were constructed 50 or 70 years after the struggle — in a nostalgic tribute to the event. Now the myth benefited wealthy business-owners with mills and factories who wanted cheap labor or land-owners who wanted cheap field-hands or tenant farmers. They couldn’t afford for poor white workers and poor black workers to join forces and demand better wages or better health care or better schools. So they kept alive and fueled the myth of State Rights and they kept feeding the hideous white supremacist ideology that has destroyed the fabric of the South.
I know. I grew up in the South and so did my husband. The maid who worked for us in the 1950’s received $10 a day plus carfare. The blacks who worked at my husband’s family farm were paid minimally. Yet we rode horses named General Hood and Traveler. We viewed Confederate statues and visited Confederama — a diorama where civil war battles could be played out over and over again by each new generation of youngsters. The old, out-dated mythology became our mythology. Except that it didn’t. I’ll never forget my horror when researching a paper during high school, I read how a black teenager wasn’t allowed to sit at a Nashville lunch counter and that, even if he did, he couldn’t afford the 10 cent hot dog offered there. As for my husband, he wrote a high school paper about the person he most admired at the time — a black farmhand named Lee West. It’s not necessary to hold fast to this ideology. It can be and should be discarded by all. And yet it’s not.
Today most working class white Southerners are still voting for wealthy individuals who don’t want to pay them fair wages, offer them decent health care or good schools. They’re still cheering for individuals who despise them. They’re still fanatic about candidates who become wealthier and wealthier as they suffer from diabetes and obesity, die from drug overdoses, and as they fight against and sometimes murder the people with whom they have most in common — working class blacks.
If you don’t believe that white supremacy ideology has been callously fabricated and disseminated as a tool by wealthy American and the politicians at their behest, one book to read is Speak Now Against the Day by John Egerton. This hefty book recounts the many times that individuals, church leaders, journalists, and a few politicians attempted to steer the South in a different direction, even before the Civil Rights era. And how their efforts were thwarted time and again.
Now some are saying we may need another Civil War to finally settle this issue. My God, wasn’t the Civil War tragic enough? Didn’t enough people die? Does it have to be replayed again and again on the diorama of American history? I hope not. I hope we can finally put to rest the poisonous ideas that serve the few and destroy the many.
