War is hell. Many Southerners in the Civil War (Northerners and Westerners too) discovered that. Those who engage in war to defend slavery, just like those who go to war to protect colonies and neo-colonies overseas, even if they believe they are “protecting liberty” and their way of life, can hardly complain when they lose and suffer the consequences of their folly. Especially when they had full democratic rights and merely lost an election to ... Republicans. Republicans who only sought to end slavery’s expansion.
Many in the South opposed the war, deserted, or went over to the Union side. Not even here talking about the 3.5 million slaves in the Old South, or the 500,000 in the border states.
Anyone who doesn’t understand by now that slavery was the root cause of secession and that the “irrepressible conflict” over decades was rooted in the different interests of a slave oligarchy and its way of life and the mid-19th century emerging system of capitalist industry, “free labor,” “free farmers” and “free men” in the North and West, is wearing historical blinders. Of course the war itself created bitter emnities — it always does.
What was unusual is that the large section of our nation which were emancipated from slavery by the Civil War, four million African Americans, were made into scapegoats and “untouchables” soon after its end. As Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois noted, black people were blamed for the war, and victimized by the peace and supposed “reconciliation” that followed. They were no longer legal chattel slaves, but were terrorized by Jim Crow and disenfranchised. Poor whites or “Republican carpet baggers” who worked in union leagues or supported Reconstruction governments were vilified as “n***** lovers.” That was when the “Noble Lost Cause” myth began and most of the monuments to the Confederacy were conceived.
So profound questions of “legacy” and “heritage” remain ... often complex questions that can and should be resolved in a democratic and open manner, where all voices are heard and weighed. In passing I would add that even the legal successes of the Civil Rights Movement, brought about largely by the heroic struggles of African-Americans after WWII, did not suddenly reverse the influence of Lost Cause “Dunning School” historians. That took time.
That the Civil Rights Movement was later “memorialized” by making MLK an almost sainted figure was to be expected and certainly represented progress, but we shouldn’t forget that if the U.S. was not then engaged in a world struggle for influence with the USSR in Africa and the Third World, elites and mainstream politicians in both parties may have allowed MLK’s movement to be crushed.
Our generation faces the old issues of interpreting history fairly and honestly, and many new issues of economics, social decay, crime, political polarization, and our declining position in the world. The dangerous intersection of all these different issues means that even while disagreeing passionately over historical questions we must maintain democratic norms, keep calm and rational, show respect where possible, and isolate the maniacs who preach racial or regional civil war or armed conflict.
