Lost Cause Nostalgia

"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."

-Alexander H. Stephens

Lately my Facebook feed has included lots of links to pages featuring the biographies of Confederate soldiers, accompanied by a daguerreotype like this one.

The "Jeff Davis and the South" sign was a particularly popular accessory item in these photos, taken at the outset of the war when they all seemed blithely confident that the whole thing would be over after one big battle, and they'd ride home, as in a Walter Scott novel, to their women and their fields.

My great great grandfather joined one of those regiments in Mississippi, and was killed in his first encounter with the Federals at Shiloh. To the best of my knowledge he's buried in a berm filled with Confederate dead that sits off beside the carefully tended Union cemetery there. His wife had started a quilt for him during that hard winter in Corinth, and stopped upon the news of his death in April of 1862. My grandmother still had that unfinished quilt when I was a kid.

I've spent too much time thinking about that war, maybe the result of my several childhood years just down the road from Kennesaw Mountain, the site of the last horrible battle the Army of Tennessee could consider a victory, briefly stopping Sherman's invasion of Georgia. The Confederates were heroes back then, in the years just after the centennial of the Civil War (and just after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, which gave impetus to a lot of Rebel nostalgia in the late 1960s), defending their homes against an invading army. They lost because there were too few of them to sustain their war of independence.

Then I got older and sort of swung the other way. One of my favorite blogs includes a series visiting the graves of historically significant figures, many you've never heard of. Whenever he visits the grave of a Southern military leader or politician of that era, he carefully points out that these are the remains of someone "who committed treason in defense of slavery." Arlington National Cemetery is situated "on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee", my childhood hero.

I came to share that view, to see the act of secession and starting a shooting war against their own country as the supreme act of treason, indefensible particularly given that it was in fact to protect the institution of slavery. And the echoes of their rhetoric in the MAGA movement, with its racism and white Christian nationalist themes, are unmistakable. So the present moment left me rather unsympathetic to the Confederate apologists.

These days I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess. I see the leaders of that movement going on two centuries ago as treasonous, racist monsters, willing to get a large swath of the country killed to preserve their right to enslave other human beings. None of that is defensible, and frankly there should have been a lot of hangings in the aftermath of the war.

But these young men in the photos, living in a world with almost no access to news or knowledge of anything going on more than fifty miles from their farms? How did they get swept up in it all, and what motivated them to leave home and fight in our first industrialized war that would kill 600,000 of them?

I see them as tragic figures, neither good nor bad, just doing what their neighbors did with only the foggiest sense of why they were doing it. Their loss is also properly laid at the feet of the planter and political class that started that pointless war.

But what makes me uncomfortable about these Facebook posts is the hagiography that emerges--they are all heroes and martyrs to the cause, blah blah blah. No they're not, any more than some Wehrmacht infantryman was a hero at Stalingrad. The taint of the cause for which they fought is just too much for that.

My guess is that these pages, which all seemed to go very active in tandem with the approach of Confederate Memorial Day this month, are mostly hosted by or affiliated with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a rather misguided organization that had, until recently, seen dwindling numbers and folks with something to lose professionally leaving or hiding their membership. I only know of one, an old lawyer friend of mine and a nice guy. We avoid the topic of the war, however.

And unsurprisingly the guys associated with the SCV, in my mostly anecdotal appraisal, are overwhelmingly MAGA. Go figure.

Enough rambling. It's fast approaching lunchtime, I've already finished two long Zoom calls to begin the day, and finals just keep getting closer.