A Distant Mirror - Recovering the American South

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ― George Orwell

Between the years of 1861 to 1865 the people of the South rose up against what they believed to be an unjust government guilty of violating the very principles upon which it was founded. For the Southern states, and indeed many in the North, certainly to include the New England states during the Hartford Convention of 1814, there was an obvious parallel between asserting their independence and that independence declared from Great Britain by their forefathers just eighty-four years prior. For four years, what many historians call the first modern war was waged on the South eventually reaching what latter day military theorists would call Total War. For three of the four years the Southern Confederacy very much held within its reach the possibility of success and independence from the American Union. The bid to establish the Southern Confederacy came at a tremendous price with repercussions that are still felt today. In our time the memory of, not only the Confederacy itself, but the very real men, women, and children that made up its armies and its homefolk are yet again the target of malignity and disenfranchisement from the American story.

A vibrant living memory of the Southern people is problematic for the revisionist wishing to shape the historical narrative to support today's social attitudes and political agendas. It is thus so because the “Old South” and more specifically its people, were very human, very real, and often very different from the portrayal so often promoted in popular culture. Books are the repository of knowledge and history is contained in books. To train the child today is to control the future tomorrow. Great debates have been held at times over what should and should not be included in our Childrens' textbooks. If you can control the language, you can control the narrative. This has been a tactic of communists, Marxists, and socialists the world over. The average student will usually rise no hirer than his teachers will take him. Once a concept has been instilled in his mind, as he grows into adulthood, he develops his worldview based on that "truth" and under normal circumstances rarely questions what he was taught as a child. Such is an effective way, albeit slow, to shape the reality of what actually happened in the past into what we as a society remember today. Missouri Senator George Graham Vest, a former Confederate congressman, summed up the literary world of the defeated in a statement printed in the Kansas City Gazette on August 21,1891, “In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians, for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side."(1)

Nowadays advances in technology have created a veritable army of researchers with the ability to glean an inestimable amount of primary source documents that are now online. In similar fashion as a housewife can raise her children at home and trade stocks on the New York Stock Exchange from her kitchen table, she can also sit at that same table and mine to considerable depths historical documents warehoused at public and private repositories from all over the world. This phenomenon circumvents the classroom where the teacher, reading from an approved lessen plan, simply lines out the accepted narrative. For those so interested, volumes of information on the war, the politics of the conflict, and the people who fought it, are now at the amateur historian’s fingertips.

Fighting Apollyon's seed

I began the Walking Home tours out of a sincere love of history and devotion to my ancestors. The timing was prompted by the radical events of 2019 and 2020 where there was an open and organized effort disguised as “racial outrage” to expunge much of American history from the landscape. A secret well-kept from most of the American public was that the destruction was not only aimed at monuments dedicated to Confederate heroes but also against historical figures that had nothing to do with the Confederacy or even the Civil War. The wave of vandalism caught in its wrath Founding Fathers in numerous places, a decorated Revolutionary War hero in New York, Pioneer statues in Oregon, European explorers in various places, an international hero American General of World War II in North Carolina, a Catholic Saint in California, a Philadelphia Mayor, a Quaker Abolitionist in California, and black Civil War soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts in Washinton, D.C., and even the famed black abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass’ statue was toppled and vandalized in New York. This type of disregard for not only public and private property but the utter disregard for truth itself is dangerous in the extreme and unfortunately is perpetuated by some in the classroom. Regardless of whatever justification may be given by apologists, this behavior is anarchy and is a tell-tale sign of a civilization in decline.

The Vacant Chair

The story of the South in particular and the story of the Civil War in general is a story of people. While we may have unofficially designated those who fought World War II as “the Greatest Generation” no generation of Americans have ever suffered what that generation of Southern people endured in their darkest hour. Of the eligible white males of military age, between 750,000 and 1,227,890 took up arms during the war.(2) If we settle on a middle estimate of 1,000,000 men serving in the Confederate Army at one time or another during the four years of war, this represents nearly 36% of the eligible males and nearly 18% of the total white population. Of the number that served, 34.6% died in service which was 6.2% of the total white population in the South.(3) By comparison, adjusted for today's population, that would equate to 20,454,221 American fighting men killed in war. In the Second World War the United States lost, military and civilian, 418,500 deaths or .32 % of the total population.(4) No one can ever question the sacrifice of the Southern people and the devotion to their cause whatever the arguments may be as to just what that cause was.

They were not traitors, and the historical record of their former adversaries as well as the constitutionality of their arguments confirm such. They were not anti-American or even anti-Union as testified by how longsuffering they were to repeated insults and encroachments upon their dignity and sovereignty before formerly declaring their independence. They were not “anti-black” and still controversial writings of Northern politicians, chief among them the “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln, and Northern newspapermen affirm such sentiments while incriminating themselves as to social attitudes towards the African in America. They were people. They were Virgina Cavaliers from the Old Country transplanted in the New World. They were the Catholic Scottish Clans displaced by years of rebellion against the English King as well as their religious opposites the Scotts Presbyterian Covenanters from the Lowlands. They were the tough as nails Scots-Irish that settled the mountainous regions of the South and gave us enduring dramatic stories like that of the Harfields and McCoys. They were the proud Louisiana Creole of mixed Spanish and French descent as well as grandsons of French aristocracy that escaped the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. They were the long time culturally assimilated American Indians of the Old Southwest when that region didn’t extend beyond the Mississippi River. Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and assorted other native Americans cast their lot with the Southern Confederacy. They were thousands of Tejanos, Texans of Mexican ancestry. Lastly, they were also black. Not great in number, no. Still there were black men who volunteered to serve The Cause. Their number would no doubt have been higher had it not been for the stoked fears of slave insurrections and short-sided interest of a well-connected elite. An entire regiment of free blacks initially joined the Confederate Army in Louisiana before being discharged from its ranks out of an overabundance of caution insisted on by the local planter class and nervous state legislators. All were people who lived, laughed, loved, cried, and died for something larger than themselves.

It is my intent to show a side of the South that has long been concealed and is lately suffering an attempt to sweep them from the collective consciousness of America. Margaret Mitchel was somewhat prophetic with her title ‘Gone with the Wind’ as it concerned the fate of the Old South that has repeatedly endured marginalization since the guns fell silent. Who would have known after all these years those winds would begin blowing again, threatening this time to erase from history even the memory of such a proud and noble people. I invite you to follow my blog series ‘A Distant Mirror – Recovering the American South’ as I trace the origin of the Southern people, their culture, and their beliefs to understand the war from their perspective and why they fought so hard for so long. - JLB

(1) Matthew Phelan, “The History of “History Is Written by the Victors”, NOV 26, 2019, SLATE, https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html

(2) United States National Park Service, “The Civil War – Facts", October 27, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts

(3) David A. Swanson and Richard R. Verdugo, “The Civil War’s Demographic Impact on White Males in the Eleven Confederate States”, Journal of Political & Military Sociology Vol. 46, No. 1 (2019), pp. 1-26 (26 pages), Published By: University of Florida Press

(4) The National WWII Museum, “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II”, August 8, 2023, www.nationalww2museum.org