Forthcoming Non Fiction: Robert E. Lee Indicted For a Variety of Sins During June 1865 by the Citizens of Norfolk, Virginia

The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case against an American Icon, John Reeves, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 270 pages, $27.00, Publication Date: July 15, 2018.

From the Publisher:  History has been kind to Robert E. Lee. Woodrow Wilson believed General Lee was a “model to men who would be morally great.” Douglas Southall Freeman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of Lee, described his subject as “one of a small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.” Winston Churchill called him “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived.” Until recently, there was even a stained glass window devoted to Lee's life at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Immediately after the Civil War, however, many northerners believed Lee should be hanged for treason and war crimes. Americans will be surprised to learn that in June of 1865 Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason by a Norfolk, Virginia grand jury. In his instructions to the grand jury, Judge John C. Underwood described treason as “wholesale murder,” and declared that the instigators of the rebellion had “hands dripping with the blood of slaughtered innocents.” In early 1866, Lee decided against visiting friends while in Washington, D.C. for a congressional hearing, because he was conscious of being perceived as a “monster” by citizens of the nation’s capital. Yet somehow, roughly fifty years after his trip to Washington, Lee had been transformed into a venerable American hero, who was highly regarded by southerners and northerners alike. Almost a century after Appomattox, Dwight D. Eisenhower had Lee’s portrait on the wall of his White House office.The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee tells the story of the forgotten legal and moral case that was made against the Confederate general after the Civil War. The actual indictment went missing for 72 years. Over the past 150 years, the indictment against Lee after the war has both literally and figuratively disappeared from our national consciousness. In this book, Civil War historian John Reeves illuminates the incredible turnaround in attitudes towards the defeated general by examining the evolving case against him from 1865 to 1870 and beyond.

Forthcoming---Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman, His Autobiography, And His Spin

Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History, Wesley Moody, University of Missouri, 200 pages, $30.00. Release Date: November 20, 2011

Review by William C. Davis for History Book Club:

"Not too many years ago a speaker at a Civil War symposium in St. Louis announced that when the program was over, he was going to visit the local cemetery where General William T. Sherman is buried to “piss on his grave.” Not the most temperate of notions, perhaps, but one that certainly reflects the attitude of millions of Southerners past and present toward one of history’s most controversial commanders. No general on either side generated more visceral animosity, nor has any other leader in the Civil War been so damned on the basis of myth, prejudice and general ignorance.

"Sherman was living in Louisiana when the crisis erupted, and in fact few other future leaders of the Union’s armies had as close an experience and understanding of the South as he did. And oddly enough, in light of his later reputation, Sherman rather liked the South, and felt some sympathy for its plight in 1861 when it found itself backed into a corner over issues surrounding slavery. One of the answers to critics who condemn him for the damage done during his march across Georgia in 1864 is that he saw it as a way of shortening the war, and thereby lessening the overall injury to the South of more years of protracted war.

"As for the widespread destruction that he perpetrated in Georgia in his March to the Sea, a great deal of it is simple myth. Scores of the houses and barns that he supposedly burned are still standing. His army, in fact, cut only a narrow swath either side of its route of march to Savannah, and even his goal was primarily seizure of foodstuffs needed by his army, and destruction of anything that could aid the Confederate war effort. There was virtually no sanctioned wanton destruction. Even the burning of much of Columbia, South Carolina, was against his orders, though he did not try over hard to prevent it once commenced.

"In his new book Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History, Wesley Moody takes on this myth and many others, including those that Sherman himself helped to create or promote. No man who has been at the center of epochal events is immune to the temptation to take the high ground in crafting his own place in history, and Sherman was no exception. His two-volume memoir, published in 1890, became almost as controversial as the general himself, and Moody does an admirable job of sifting the fact from the “spin.”

"What emerges is a Sherman who was neither beast nor saint, neither a cruel destroyer of civilians and their world, nor a far-seeing prophet of 20th-century warfare. Historians and readers of today may find as much stuff of controversy in Moody’s depiction of Sherman as our ancestors did in the man himself, but no student or study of the man who made war a sort of hell can afford to ignore Demon of the Lost Cause in the future.

"By the way. The historian in St. Louis changed his mind, and Sherman’s grave remains to date, so far as is known, unsoiled."

New and Noteworthy----How Did Stonewall Jackson Become Worshipped?

The Surprising Story of How Stonewall Jackson Became a Mythical Figure for the Religious Right, Wallace Hettle, History News Network, July 5, 2011.

Next week will mark the 150th anniversary of First Bull Run, the initial major battle of the Civil War. The combat that day remains memorable for several reasons, including the importance of the telegraph and the use of trains to transport troops. Few images in Civil War history are more compelling and tragic than the panic of green Union soldiers running away from the field.

One other notable aspect of First Bull Run is that here Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson got his nickname. South Carolina’s Barnard Bee, mortally wounded in the battle, is believed to have proclaimed something like “there stands Jackson like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here and we shall conquer.” He may have said it, though it is not clear who heard him in the din of battle. If he did say that above the clash of artillery, we may think his words a bit pretentious. It does not matter: Jackson had been “baptized with blood.” The Confederacy needed a hero with a cool nickname, and Jackson fit the bill.

Jackson’s heroic wartime image, as well as his posthumous reputation, is not just about a nickname. Jackson became a truly great general, but his fame goes beyond his military exploits. While the Lost Cause movement to memorialize the Confederacy may have slightly faded by the middle of the twentieth century, traces of admiration for Jackson remain on the landscape today. If a traveler wants to commemorate Jackson’s death, he needs to visit a good half dozen sites. The first would be the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery in Lexington, Virginia. There Jackson lies with his second wife and daughter under a suitably idealized statue of the standing general, sculpted by Edward Valentine in 1891. From the cemetery, one can continue in Lexington to the Virginia Military Institute, or VMI, where Jackson taught until 1861. VMI, in ways more numerous than one can describe in brief, serves as a living memorial to Jackson. A perennial attraction there is the mounted hide of Jackson’s warhorse, Little Sorrel. The horse’s hide attracts 50,000 viewers a year. After the long-past indignity of being skinned by a taxidermist, Little Sorrel today gets genuine respect. Rescued from a drawer on campus in 1997, the horse’s bones have been buried under a tastefully understated marker in his memory, on the school’s parade grounds.

If one travels east to the battlefield at Chancellorsville, Virginia, one can see both a modern obelisk and an older, timeworn tablet, both of which supposedly mark the spot where a fatal volley fired by his own men hit Jackson. (Of course, both markers cannot be correct.) There is a related shrine about thirty miles to the south. Jackson was badly wounded in his left arm, and the risk of gangrene required amputation. After emergency surgery, authorities quickly moved him south to Guinea Station. The surgery failed to save the general, who lingered and died of pneumonia, or perhaps sepsis. A “Stonewall Jackson Shrine,” complete with the deathbed, still marks where Jackson passed away.

However, that still leaves more spots on the tour. Strange as it may seem, no tribute to Jackson’s death can neglect his left arm, buried on the Chancellorsville battlefield. The site of Jackson’s arm, marked by a simple gravestone, is open to the public on weekends only. During the week, the National Park Service can provide a pass and directions to the resting place of the arm, which lies on park service land. James Power Smith, the last surviving member of Jackson’s staff, erected the marker in 1903, on land known as Ellwood Plantation, which the park service has recently acquired. According to Park Service historian John Hennessey, his colleagues have been surprised by the “intense interest generated not by the magnificent [Ellwood] house, but by the curiosity of Jackson’s arm.” There is a final irony in Jackson’s highly memorialized death. Smith’s marker only approximately shows where Jackson’s arm lays—no one today is quite sure where it is actually buried. Still, tourists come to visit what they believe is the site of Jackson’s arm, and the marker rewards them with a sense of certainty that they have completed their task.

Scholar Barry Schwartz has described modern America as a cynical “post-heroic society.” After Vietnam, Watergate, and a host of other scandals, sophisticated Americans are supposed to know that even the greatest of leaders can have glaring flaws. Some of us today feel a bit foolish expressing adulation for any historical figure. Yet a significant audience still idolizes Jackson. Readers of military history see in him an admirable blend of ferocity and genius, and treat his Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862 as a sign of greatness. In the wake of Ron Maxwell’s laudatory 2003 film featuring Jackson, Gods and Generals, a significant number of present-day Americans found inspiration in the Jackson family’s home life, seemingly based on ideals of Christian piety. Jackson also receives accolades for his conspicuous religiosity. As journalist Jeff Sharlet noted in a Harper’s Magazine story, “In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy.”

Thus, Jackson remains a hero to this day, admired by countless Americans north and south. Among Confederate heroes, only Robert E. Lee surpasses Jackson in popular esteem. Such veneration is difficult to measure with precision. Yet as recently as 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp honoring Jackson, making him a figure who apparently transcends the normal bureaucratic dynamics of political correctness. That stamp, mounted as a lapel pin, was one of many tributes to Jackson available on eBay in 2010.

Martyrs like Jackson are as varied as the myth-makers who tell their stories. In spite of Jackson’s popularity with southern conservatives, martyrdom is not just a quirk of the religious right. If you dislike Jackson because he fought for the Confederacy and owned slaves, you can revere the Chicago’s Haymarket martyrs, left-wing folksinger Joe Hill, or Leon Trotsky. If politics is not your thing, there is always fiction. There is Uncle Tom, for example. My son, like so many kids, admires Harry Potter’s mentor, Dumbledore, who was slain by a double agent working for the evil Voldemort.

In writing about Jackson in history and memory, I ran a certain risk. I am a life-long resident of the Midwest, raised in a Protestant church. I have read every book on the Lost Cause I could find. Yet Jackson, the monuments, markers, and relics all struck me as a little weird—almost like Catholic reverence for a saint. Since this view of heritage activities is enormously patronizing to conservative white southerners, I have tried to excise it from my book. (I may not have succeeded, but you will have to read the book to find that out). For most people the decision to revere a heroic martyr is not bizarre or pernicious—it is a way of identifying with a selfless act for the good of a higher cause. My home office sports a bust of Jackson, but across the room a Malcolm X poster stares down ominously at Stonewall. Some would say that fascination with dead heroes is out step in our supposedly skeptical age, but such a view embodies a condescension towards ordinary people I would rather do without.

Wallace Hettle is professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa and the author of Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory.


Text Source: History News Network, July 5, 2011

News---If All Men Are Created Equal, Then Are 'Lost Cause' Explanations A Heritage Violation?

150 Years After Fort Sumter: Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War, David von Drehle, Time Magazine, April 18, 2011, pp. 40-51.

During the previous decade Civil War Librarian came across the term 'heritage violation' during Civil War reenacting events and while keeping an eye on the fracturing of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans organization.

Heritage violation is a term that has come to be used in a specific way regarding what some perceive to be unfaithful depictions and untrue remarks about the Confederate experience and Confederate history.

During the 145th Antietam reenactment a heritage violation occurred when Confederate refused to reenact accurately the defense of the Sunken Road. They abandoned the road and the Confederate left flank marched within yards of the grandstand to assault the right of the Federal assault on the Road. As a 'wounded Federal' on the far right flank of the Sunken Road, CWL witnessed this. A glorious deception was worked upon the grandstand audience that day by a portion of the Confederate command.

YouTube's video collection of the reenactment of Jefferson Davis' inauguration in February 2011 includes remarks by Sons of Confederate Veterans. The remarks reveal a heart felt desire to stop others from pejorative labelling and associating the Confederacy with terrorism and Nazism. In the excerpt below, David Von Drehle addresses the continued trend among some to argue that the American Civil War was caused by everything but slavery. The Internet link to the entire text is placed at the end of the excerpt.

Excerpt: The question "What caused the Civil War?" returns 20 million Google hits and a wide array of arguments on Internet comment boards and discussion threads. The Civil War was caused by Northern aggressors invading an independent Southern nation. Or it was caused by high tariffs. Or it was caused by blundering statesmen. Or it was caused by the clash of industrial and agrarian cultures. Or it was caused by fanatics. Or it was caused by the Marxist class struggle.

On and on, seemingly endless, sometimes contradictory — although not among mainstream historians, who in the past generation have come to view the question much as Lincoln saw it. "Everything stemmed from the slavery issue," says Princeton professor James McPherson, whose book Battle Cry of Freedom is widely judged to be the authoritative one-volume history of the war. Another leading authority, David Blight of Yale, laments, "No matter what we do or the overwhelming consensus among historians, out in the public mind, there is still this need to deny that slavery was the cause of the war."

It's not simply a matter of denial. For most of the first century after the war, historians, novelists and filmmakers worked like hypnotists to soothe the post traumatic memories of survivors and their descendants. Forgetting was the price of reconciliation, and Americans — those whose families were never bought or sold, anyway — were happy to pay it.

But denial plays a part, especially in the South. After the war, former Confederates wondered how to hold on to their due pride after a devastating defeat. They had fought long and courageously; that was beyond question. So they reverse-engineered a cause worthy of those heroics. They also sensed, correctly, that the end of slavery would confer a gloss of nobility, and bragging rights, on the North that it did not deserve. As Lincoln suggested in his second Inaugural Address, the entire nation, North and South, profited from slavery and then paid dearly for it.

The process of forgetting, and obscuring, was long and layered. Some of it was benign, but not all. It began with self-justifying memoirs by defeated Confederate leaders and was picked up by war-weary veterans on both sides who wanted to move on. In the devastated South, writers and historians kindled comforting stories of noble cavaliers, brilliant generals and happy slaves, all faithful to a glorious lost cause. In the prosperous North, where cities and factories began filling with freed slaves and their descendants, large audiences were happy to embrace this idea of a time when racial issues were both simple and distant.

History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present. And for generations of Americans after the Civil War, the present did not have room for that radical idea laid bare by the conflict: that all people really are created equal. That was a big bite to chew.

The once obvious truth of the Civil War does not imply that every soldier had slavery on his mind as he marched and fought. Many Southerners fought and died in gray never having owned a slave and never intending to own one. Thousands died in blue with no intention to set one free. But it was slavery that had broken one nation in two and fated its people to fight over whether it would be put back together again. The true story is not a tale of heroes on one side and villains on the other. Few true stories are. But it is a clear and straightforward story, and so is the tale of how that story became so complicated.

This Excerpt is continued at Time Magazine, April 18, 2011

Opinion---Washington Post Columnist Asks Dixie To Do The Impossible: Disown R. E. Lee

Robert E. Lee, Symbol Of The South's Greatest Mistake: It's Time To Disown The Civil War General, Richard Cohen, New York Daily News, April 26th 2011

The Opinion: It has taken a while, but it's about time Robert E. Lee lost the Civil War. The South was defeated on the battlefield in 1865, yet the Lee legend - swaddled in myth, kitsch and racism - has endured even past the civil rights era, when it became urgent to finally tell the "Lost Cause" to get lost. Now it's Lee's turn. He was loyal to slavery and disloyal to his country - not worthy of the honors accorded him.

I confess to always being puzzled by the cult of Lee. Whatever his personal or military virtues, he offered himself to the cause of slavery. He owned slaves and fought in the courts to keep them. He commanded the vast army of a nation dedicated to the proposition that white people could own black people and sell them off as the owner saw fit. Such a man cannot be admired.

But he is. All over the South, particularly in his native Virginia, the cult of Lee is manifested in streets, highways and schools named for him. When I first moved to the Washington area, I used to marvel at these homages to the man. What was being honored? Slavery? Treason? Or maybe, for this is how I perceive him, no sense of humor? I also wondered what a black person was supposed to think. Chagrin or rage would be perfectly appropriate.

I kept thinking I must be missing something. I imagined all sorts of virtues in his face. He is always dignified in photos, a perfect pill of a man yet somehow adored by his men. They cheered him when he left Appomattox Court House, having just surrendered. They shouted, Hooray for Lee! Hooray for what?

Now comes Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, who in an essay for The New York Times gives us a Lee at odds with the one of gauzy myth. He was not the creature of crushing political pressure who had little choice but to pick his state over his country. In fact, members of his own family stuck with the Union.

"When Lee consulted his brothers, sister and local clergymen, he found that most leaned toward the Union," Pryor wrote. "At a grim dinner with two close cousins, Lee was told that they also intended to uphold their military oaths. . . . Sister Anne Lee Marshall unhesitatingly chose the Northern side, and her son outfitted himself in blue uniform." Pryor says that about 40% of Virginia officers "would remain with the Union forces."

After the war, the South embraced a mythology of victim hood. An important feature was the assertion that the war had been not about slavery at all but about states' rights. The secessionists themselves were not so shy. In their various declarations, they announced they were leaving the Union to preserve slavery. Lee not only accepted the Lost Cause myth, he propagated it and came to embody it.

Lee was a brilliant field marshal whose genius was widely acknowledged - Lincoln wanted him to command the Union forces. A commander of more modest talents might have been beaten sooner, might not have taken the war to the North (Gettysburg) and expended so many lives. Lee is an American Rommel, the German general who fought brilliantly, but for Hitler.

British novelist L. P. Hartleay's observation that "the past is a foreign country" cautions us all against facile judgments. In the antebellum South, there were plenty of people who recognized the evil of slavery and the folly of secession. Lee was not one of them and deserves no honor. In the awful war that began 150 years ago this month, he fought on the wrong side for the wrong cause. It's time for the South to honor the ones who were right.

Text Source: Washington Post April 25, 2011
Image Source: The Truth About Guns

CWL: The past is a foreign country to Richard Cohen. CWL understands that Lee was a slaveholder, who broke his oath of honorable allegiance made at West Point and who loved Virginia above his country. But to call Lee "an American Rommel . . . who fought for Hitler" demonizes the Confederacy. Complaining that Lost Cause ideology embraced 'victim hood' Cohen turns around and likens the Confederacy to Nazi Germany. As much as The Lost Cause promoters get it wrong so does Cohen get it wrong. The arrogance of his opinion discredits his argument that The Lost Cause promoters should look hard at the facts, less at their navels, and stop complaining about the negative images of themselves in the media.

Sesquicentennial News---The Slave Republic and the Sons of Confederate Veterans

The Election of 1860 and Secession—to Preserve Slavery, Douglas Egerton, History News Network, November 15, 2010.

When news of Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency reached South Carolina on Nov. 8, 1860, joyful Charlestonians took to the streets as if their candidate had won. They erected liberty poles near the battery, and booming cannon saluted the Palmetto flag. "The tea has been thrown overboard," editorialized the Charleston Mercury. "The revolution of 1860 has been initiated."

That evening, in a foreshadowing of events to come, fireworks lit the sky above Fort Sumter. Who could doubt, wrote Mercury publisher Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., "that the other Slaveholding States, when once the Union is broken," would join "in the formation of a Slave Republic" to protect "their institutions, from Abolition rule in Washington?"

Autumn 2010 marks the sesquicentennial of the election of 1860 and the secession of South Carolina. In 1860 Americans understood what was at stake, though they scarcely knew how to respond. Defeated Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas labored to craft a compromise to bring the seceding states back into the union. Meanwhile, President-elect Lincoln refused to budge on his party's opposition to slavery in the territories. A compromise on southern demands for the West, he said, might lead to "filibustering for all [foreign lands] South of us, and making slave states of it."

A century and a half later, many Americans have been misled about the events leading up to the Civil War. A new textbook for Virginia fourth graders, Joy Masoff's Our Virginia, Past and Present, makes the wholly untrue claim that "thousands of southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks." The notion that black Americans willingly fought for what Rhett called "a Slave Republic" is no accidental error. Rather, that falsehood, commonly advanced by groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, is designed to perpetrate a larger lie: that the Confederacy did not exist to protect slavery, or that slavery was not the root cause of the bloodiest conflict in our history.

And Masoff has company in this deception. Last spring Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell declared April to be Confederate History Month in Virginia. The governor's initial announcement failed to mention slavery. When asked why, he insisted that "there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states." McDonnell later amended his statement, but Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a fellow Republican, rushed to his defense. The whole controversy "doesn't amount to diddly," sniffed Barbour, who, according to a recent Newsweek profile, has a Confederate flag, signed by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, hanging on the wall of his office.

As the nation readies itself for anniversary ceremonies marking the war years, Americans need to understand why the Civil War took place. If McDonnell hopes that American students will study the history of the Confederacy, educators at all levels should support him. But if he wishes to honor what Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens described as a nation whose "corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man," then his proclamation should offend all Americans.

Modern defenders of Confederate History Month point out that a majority of southern whites did not own slaves, a fact that is true but irrelevant. The Confederacy was not forged by middle-class farmers but by planters who correctly feared that Lincoln's election and the Republican policy of restricting slavery from western territories imperiled the slave system. Of the white South Carolinians who met in a state convention to vote for secession, 90.5 percent were slaveholders. And of those convention delegates who owned slaves, 41.4 percent owned fifty or more black Americans, while twenty-seven were among the largest planters in the South.


Despite the fact that the Confederate Constitution explicitly protected slavery, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who wrote much of McDonnell's initial statement and supplied the research for Masoff's text, claim that the "preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision" to secede. In reality, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, non-slaveholding soldiers quickly lost interest in dying to preserve the property rights of rich planters. When reenlistments fell off, the Confederate Congress responded in the spring of 1862 with the first draft law ever passed in the Western Hemisphere. That law exempted whites who owned twenty or more slaves.

Unlike supporters of Confederate History Month, who persist in claiming that some African Americans supported the breakaway republic, secessionists were completely honest in explaining why they desired a separate country. On a speaking tour of the North in 1860, former Alabama Congressman William Lowndes Yancey told a Boston audience that the founding fathers had intended the nation to be forever governed by a white "master race." Speaking in Frederick Douglass's Rochester, N.Y., Yancey promised that "all we ask is to be allowed to keep southern slavery, and we will not let the negro insult you by coming here and marrying your daughters." Confederate President Jefferson Davis agreed. As the owner of more than two hundred slaves, the Mississippian attributed secession to the "hostile measures" waged by northern politicians "for the purpose of rendering insecure our property in slaves."

When governors and influential southern politicians protest that they merely wish to honor Confederate veterans, they willfully mangle history by ignoring the root cause of secession. Joy Masoff is right about one thing. Americans should study Confederate history, if only to better understand why there was a Civil War and to learn just how far our nation still has to travel when it comes to race.

Douglas Egerton, a descendant of North Carolina slaveholders and Confederates, teaches American history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. His books include Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War (2010). Attribution to the History News Service and the author is required for reprinting and redistribution of this article.

Text Source: History News Network, November 15, 2010

Top Image Source: South Carolina Secessionist Banner

Bottom Image Source: Free West

Sesquicentennial News---Was The Confederacy America's Worst Idea?

The Confederacy, America's Worst Idea, Stephanie McCurry, American History Magazine, December 2010, pp. 29-35.

On the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, can we finally admit the truth about why the South lost? Stephanie McCurry asks this question and suggests a clear eyed examination of what the Confederate experiment attempted to accomplish. Discussions of the constitutionality of secession should not be the end but the beginning of the review. Why did secessionists insist on exercising the secession? What kind of nation did the Confederates aspire to construct? If they had peacefully departed or if they had successfully revolted, what kind of country would have been the result? Confederates seceded to secure the future of slavery.

Yet, they succeeded in producing the conditions that would produce the total and immediate destruction of slavery. War created the federal government sponsored emancipation of slaves. If the Confederacy had succeeded or if the war had ceased short of the Confederacy's total defeat and surrender, African-Americans' future would have included more generations of enslavement, more horrific assaults on their personal safety, their families, their human rights and dignity.

Near the end of the war Confederates considered the enlistment of black slaves in the military in order to secure the success of a slaveholder's republic. If slaves owed allegiance to the Confederacy, then could they also be traitors? To consider this is to move slaves from being property owned by masters to slaves with obligations to a government. This the Confederate Congress refused to do. Emancipation would never be the reward for blacks loyalty to the Confederacy. If they served the Confederate government, that service would be provided as the slaveholders' prerogative.

Slaves' resistance, slaveholders' prerogatives, and state sovereignty inhibited the success of the Confederacy. The war became the reckoning. Confederate vice-president to this. For him the original American republic rested on the equality of all men, no matter the ethnic or race. He stated that the new Confederate government "is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, on the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great truth."

During the sesquicentennial and the Confederacy is remembered, McCurry believes every American should count themselves lucky that Americans were spared "the future the Confederate States of America promised."

Image Source: South Carolina News Sheet

Opinion---Ghost Hunting, Ancestor Worship and the Search for a Usable Past in The Lost Cause

The Ghost of Bobby Lee, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic Magazine, April 13, 2010.

CWL: This essay may help answer the question "Will be able to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War without being either politically correct or politically incorrect?"

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until--in all honesty--some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and "lucky" enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee's relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.

It was sad to hear frankly. If the war actually weren't about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier. But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid. What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present.

The God of History binds the Confederacy in its own chains. From the declaration of secession in Texas...

...in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states....

To Virginia...

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitition were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.

To Mississippi...

....Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin...

To South Carolina...

...A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

To the Vice-President of the Confederacy itself...

The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

This is about a lancing shame, about that gaping wound in the soul that comes when confronted with the appalling deeds of our forebears. Lost Causers worship their ancestors, in the manner of the abandoned child who brags that his dead-beat father is actually an astronaut, away on a mission of cosmic importance.

I know how this goes. For us, it's coping with the fact that people who looked like you sold you into slavery. It's understanding that you come from a place that was on the wrong side of the Gatling gun. It's feeling not simply like one of history's losers, but that you had no right to win. The work of the mature intellect is to reconcile oneself to the past without a retreat into fantasy--in either direction. Claiming to be the descendant of kings and queens is just as bad as claiming to be thankful for the slave trade.

It's weak to manipulate the dead in order to reconcile our present, to force men to play our Gods. Robert E. Lee was a man, and a product of a time and place that turned people into, quite literally, the most valuable resource in this country. I hate to keep taking it back to David Blight but...

By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society--slave population--in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. Brazil was close. But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars--that's just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today's dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.

These were the kind of forces at work in his world, and I'm not convinced we have the intrinsic right to expect someone like Lee to oppose them. Likewise, I may think that it was sinister for people who "looked like me" to sell me into slavery, but that presumes an expectation of racial unity which almost certainly didn't exist at the time. Again, it summons the dead to do the work that I would shy away from.

I think this boils down to the problem of nationalism, and where we find our heroes. It isn't like Southerners are devoid of people who were courageous in all aspects. There's the great Virginian patriot George Henry Robert Thomas, who goes from slave-master in waiting, to leading black troops in brilliant military campaigns in Tennessee, and in his last days defends the rights of freedman. There's Elizabeth Van Lew, who emancipated all her slaves before the War, and used them as part of a Union spy network in Richmond, the Confederate capitol.

There's "The Boat-Thief" Robert Smalls, a slave who stole Confederate transport steamer, filled with armaments, and sailed it to Union lines. There's Andre Callioux, a manumitted slave turned Union soldier, martyred at Port Hudson in a kamikaze-like charge on the Confederate works. And a century later, there's Martin Luther King, arguably the modern founding father of this America. He was a product of The South, and his moral judgement didn't end at the Mason-Dixon line.

Finally, there's the question of how we claim ancestors, a question that is more philosophical than biological. Africa, and African-America, means something to me because I claim it as such--but I claim much more. I claim Fitzgerald, whatever he thought of me, because I see myself in Gatsby. I claim Steinbeck because, whether he likes it or not, I am an Okie. I claim Blake because "London" feels like the hood to me.

And I claim them right alongside Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin and Ralph Wiley, who had it so right when he parried Saul Bellow. The dead, and the work they leave---the good and bad--is the work of humanity and thus says something of us all. And in that manner, I must be humble and claim some of Lee, Jackson, and Forrest. What might I have been in another skin, in another country, in another time?

Text and Image Source: Atlantic Magazine

News----Obama Honors Confederate and Black Soldiers on Memorial Day

Separate but Equal Wreaths are Not a Permanent Solution to the Memorial Day Conundrum, James W. Loewen, History News Networtk, May 29, 2009.
See CWL entry May 20, 2009 for petition to not set a wreath at Arlington's Confederate Memorial. Mr. Loewen, the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, started a petition asking President Obama not to honor the Arlington Confederate Monument.

Although I had signed petitions to the President going back to the '60s, before Memorial Day 2009 I had never helped to start one. This year, the fact that neo-Confederates misconstrue the Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery to misconstrue the Civil War to misconstrue the Confederate cause got to me ... especially since every Memorial Day, the President of the United States lends his prestige to that monument by sending it a wreath.

We (Ed Sebesta and I) wound up with more than 60 co-signers, including major historians of the Civil War period like David Blight, Vernon Burton, and James McPherson; other distinguished historians like John Dittmer, Paul Finkelman, and Kenneth Jackson; and scholars in allied disciplines like Grey Gundaker, Florence Roisman, and Amilcar Shabazz. Leaders or former leaders of important organizations lent their names, including Josh Brown, Lee Formwalt, Susan Glisson, and Roger Kennedy. Professors of education signed, including Sonia Nieto, David Shiman, and Bill Ayers.

Ayers is on my contacts list because, more than a dozen years ago, he participated in inviting me to speak to pre-service teachers at the University of Illinois (Chicago) about ideas in my best-seller, Lies My Teacher Told Me. When sending out emails to people on my list, I considered omitting him, since I knew of his toxic fame. I emailed him anyway, because Sarah Palin had told us all he was a "pal" of President Obama, because it did not feel right to censor my contacts list, and also because I just wanted to see what would happen.

It turned out that the only name the media cared about was Ayers. The Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, headlined its story, "Radical Bill Ayers dogs Obama, even on Memorial Day." Within the story, Ayers's name does not appear until the 14th paragraph, which is appropriate. But no other signer's name appears at all — not mine, not Sebesta's, not even McPherson's, surely America's pre-eminent scholar on the period, whose Battle Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer Prize. Today, searching for "Ayers Obama "Memorial Day" wreath yields 7,570 hits, while "McPherson Obama "Memorial Day" yields just 2,570.

On Sebesta's list of contacts was art historian Kirk Savage, whose book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves treats Civil War memorials. Savage penned an op-ed to the Washington Post suggesting that President Obama continue the tradition of the Confederate wreath, but also send one to the new African American Civil War Memorial in DC. (He had proposed this to Sebesta, but for reasons this essay notes, Ed rejected the idea.) The Post never did a story about our petition but did print Savage's op-ed opposing it.

Despite the Post's silence, AP and other outlets picked up the story. A minor controversy followed. HNN's posting of our petition drew 90 comments. A blog about the matter at Daily Kos spurred more than 250. Savage's op-ed generated nine pages at WashingtonPost.com. Many were from neo-Confederates attacking any challenge to their beloved Confederate legend. Others, however, came from people respectful of the cause of good race relations while also respectful of the dead.

Americans need to understand that Confederate Memorials come in two kinds. One type remembers and honors the dead. The other glorifies the cause and typically obfuscates what it was (which was slavery). The Arlington monument is of the second type. Donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, erected during the Nadir of Race Relations, it does not purport to tell accurate history. It even gets the number of Confederate states wrong, implying that 14 seceded, when only 11 did. Moreover, in recent years neo-Confederates have deliberately misconstrued a black body servant, included in the bas-reliefs, as a Confederate soldier. Then they cite him as "evidence" that thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy. As a corollary, this claim continues, the South could not have seceded for slavery.

Why should the President privilege this monument over, say, the Confederate monument in neighboring Alexandria, a pensive statue of the former type? Why, for that matter, should the President privilege this monument over every single monument to United States troops in the Civil War?

It might be said that he no longer does. Unlike his predecessors from Wilson to W, Obama eventually followed Savage's idea and sent two wreaths, one to the Confederate monument, one to the African American monument. Doing so was certainly a significant advance over former practice. However, dual wreaths implicitly equate service for the Union and service against it. They also implicitly equate war fought to maintain and extend slavery with war eventually fought (admittedly, not at first) to end slavery. Surely both sides are not of equal moral value.

This is not the place to make the argument that the South seceded for slavery, not states' rights. Everyone knew this in 1860-61. Today anyone who believes that the Southern states left because they favored states' rights has only to search for and read "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." Also useful is my short chapter on Gettysburg in Lies Across America, which tells why and when the states' rights myth began to be told.

To be sure, neither Savage nor the president probably intended to equate North and South. Surely, both Savage and the president meant this "solution" as a way to sidestep all such moral and historical issues and merely honor the dead on both sides. Thus the president assuages two "special interests": neo-Confederates on the one side, and African Americans (and historians) on the other. Left out are United States Civil War veterans as a whole — white and black together.

Hoping to avoid post-petition depression, I humbly suggest that important historical questions remain. Why would presidents of the United States, for almost a hundred years, send wreaths just to the Southern side — the losing side and the wrong side — of our greatest war? Did presidents ever send wreaths to U.S. Civil War monuments — perhaps to the G.A.R. monument in DC — before the Nadir of Race Relations set in? Has even one of the 2,000+ Union monuments ever received a presidential wreath on Memorial Day since the Nadir? What is the connection between race relations of the time and how we remember the past?

Text and Image Source: History News Network

Image Caption: The day after, the President’s wreath lies in a heap to the side of the Confederate monument.

News----Historians Protest Tradition: President's Memorial Day Wreath on Confederate Memorial In Arlington Cementery

Scholars Ask Obama Not to Send a Wreath to Confederate Memorial Press Release by James Loewen, History News Network, May 20, 2009.

More than four dozen prominent professors, historians and authors have signed a letter asking President Barack Obama to break with a tradition that they say represents the values of white supremacy and neo-Confederacy. The group is asking Mr. Obama to be the first president since Woodrow Wilson not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington DC on Memorial Day.

Co-signers of the letter include: James Loewen, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Vermont; Paul Finkelman, William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law, Albany Law School; James McPherson, Professor of History, Princeton University; William Lee Miller, Scholar in Ethics and Institutions at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia; and many others.

The letter, written by Edward Sebesta, editor of "Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction," University of Texas Press, and James Loewen details the history of the monument and the way that racist and neo-Confederate groups have used the monument to glorify the Confederacy and racist values.

The monument was given to the Federal Government by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and in 1914, and was, Sebesta writes, "intended to legitimize secession and the principles of the Confederacy and glorify the Confederacy." Prior to the administration of George H. W. Bush, the commemorative wreath was presented on or near the birthday of Jefferson Davis. The occasion has been marked on Memorial Day since the presidency of George H.W. Bush.

"It isn’t just a remembrance of the dead," Sebesta continues. "The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers. In its design it also tells wrong history, boasting fourteen shields with the coat of arms of fourteen states. Thus it claims that Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland were part of the Confederacy. They weren’t."

Text Source: History News Network Tuesday,May 19, 2009

Read the Letter.

Image Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Other Voices---Marketing Myths in Dixie?

Marketing the South: Commercial Mythmaking And Reshaping Of Popular Memories, www.physorg.com, January 8, 2008.

The historical, competitive, and ideological factors that structure the practices of commercial mythmaking remain largely unexplored and undertheorized. Now, a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research investigates these interrelationships by performing a comparative analysis of two prominent New South mythmakers – editors of nationally distributed magazines about the South – who are seeking to ideologically reconstruct the historical legacy of antebellum, confederate, and segregationist South in ways that serve their commercial agendas.

A countervailing system of meanings has been culturally propagated through the ceaseless efforts of Southern intellectuals, politicians, writers, journalists, historical preservationists, and business leaders to place a redeeming light on the region’s historical heritage,” explain Craig Thompson (University of Wisconsin Madison) and Kelly Tian (New Mexico State University). “Through these myth making activities, this broad coalition of Southern mythmakers sought to defend the honor of their Confederate ancestors, rebuke the cultural stigmas that had been ascribed to white Southern identities and perhaps most of all, attract infusions of Northern capital needed to build a more prosperous New South.”

The South has a peculiar place in American history. Its (mythologized) heritage, and the enduring socio-economic patterns set by the aftermath of Reconstruction, has generated prominent ideological templates through which race and class relations in the United States have been mapped and contested. Over the course of the twentieth century, the South has been recurrently portrayed in the broader national media as a benighted and backward region that mirrored the presumed prejudices and character flaws of its poor white rural inhabitants.

“These Southern white identity myths venerate a cultural heritage that remains dogged by traces of polarizing racial divisions that are carried forward as countermemories,” Thompson and Tian write.

“The researchers focus on myths, that is, stories and conceptualizations of the South that are not fully true or all-inclusive. These myths help consumers resolve contradictions in their lives and construct personal and communal identities. Two editors of popular magazines about the south reveal the ways they structure their articles and features to disprove specific threatening myths and promote others that reshape memories. They reveal three related white identity myths that have been prevalent in commercial representations of Southern culture:

The myth of the Lost Cause: the Confederacy viewed as a legion of gallant Christian Knights serving a divine cause. Serves to release white Southerners from guilt by reshaping their memories of the brutal conditions of the slaves.

Moonlight and Magnolias: represents Southern womanhood as a vulnerable vessel of virtue. Gone with the Wind depicted both the “Lost Cause” and the “Moonlight/Magnolias” myths, with unprecedented box office success.

The Celtic myth: stereotypes poor Southern whites as lazy, drunk, uneducated hillbillies, due to their Celtic blood line. Projects blame for societal problems on the “racist Southern redneck.”

“Through their ideological strategies to manage these diversified, but equally, problematic countermemories, these New South mythmakers are also engaging in a market system negotiation over the identity value of their proffered commercial myths, which is itself embedded in a still broader cultural conversation over the South’s place in the socio-cultural landscape of American society” Thompson and Tian write.

“Our investigation has developed a genealogical framework that we hope will facilitate further research into these consequential intersections of commercial culture, popular memory, countermemory, and identity politics

Source http://www.physorg.com/news119026833.html

CWL---The Confederates, The Crater, and Their Recollections

Is Not The Glory Enough To Give Us A Share?: An Analysis of Competing Memories fo the Battle of the Crater, Kevin M. Levin, in The View From the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editor, University of Kentucky Press, 2007, pp. 227-248.

On July 30, 1864 four divisions of the Federal 9th Corps assaulted a crevasse that was 200 feet long, 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep that had been created by the explosion of 4 tons of gunpowder under a Confederate fort in the Petersburg, Virginia line. Their assault was countered by a brigade of South and North Carolinians and three brigades of Virginians. The Rebels won the battle and the Virginians won the history.

In 1936 the National Park Service acquired the Crater's site and relied upon the Virginians' accounts to tell the story of the battle. The debates between the Carolinians and the Virginians were part of the collective debate among veterans over the causes and the glory of the war. A national narrative that ignored the importance of slavery and emancipation and elevated the brotherhood of war was constructed from the 1870s through the 1940s. The Southern veterans argued over their battlefield accomplishments and revolved around the states since their CSA had dissolved. State and local history were developed by the frictions of state rubbing against state for domination of the process of memorializing, history writing, and memory construction of the war.

The earliest interpretations of war were authored by the veterans. Personal, unit, and state pride were developed and, to a degree, historical accuracy was sacrificed. Edward Pollard, wartime editor of the Daily Richmond Examiner, produced The Lost Cause in 1866. The Southern Historical Society Papers, first issued in 1876, gave those outside of Virginia a forum for marking their place in the War of the Rebellion. The Confederate Veteran appeared in 1893 and a wedge between Virginians and other Confederates were again driven between Confederate veterans.

Kevin Levin, who offers the weblog Civil War Memory, develops these themes through a discussion of how the Battle of the Crater has been written and rewritten in the course of the 150 years since the end of the war. His essay is a case study of Civil War memory that, in the past decade, has been addressed by David Blight, Fritzhugh Bundage, David Goldfield, Carol Reardon and others have developed. Kevin Levin's weblog is located at http://civilwarmemory.typepad.com/civil_war_memory