Confederates In the Backyard?

Cornell Sun ^ | April 12, 2005 | Andy Guess

[stainlessbanner]

The defining moment of my visit to New Orleans a year ago occurred in a gift shop. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but at least it wasn't the kind that sells feather boas and t-shirts with jazz-playing lobsters. I wasn't a sorority girl nursing my hangover at Café Du Monde during Mardi Gras; I was a tourist visiting what used to be a sprawling, stately slave plantation.

I was busy mulling over that subtly troubling experience, browsing through the gift shop's bookshelves, when I came to a curious array of volumes. The title The South Was Right! jumped out at me first, and it took me a few minutes of thumbing through it to convince myself that it wasn't actually a joke. Stunned, I went down the line, looking in disbelief as each title lamented the once-great Confederacy and the common values it stood for. My favorite item was The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book, which I suspect is perfect for young Dixiecrats of all ages. I bought it just to remind myself that it exists.

I wonder how many parents in Louisiana are reading their children bedtime stories about their heroic ex-president.

It is this experience and others that have made me curious about a sliver of the South that -- apparently -- exists right here in upstate New York. Plenty of students coming back from breaks, sometimes along with their bubbly parents, have driven past a specific abode that has one memorable defining feature. On Route 79, that country road that often takes us home, there boasts a large, proud Confederate flag on the front wall of this particular house. You've probably seen it.

Why here, 200 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line? That was the question that ricocheted in my mind one night as I drove past; so to find my answer, I pulled over and knocked on the door. Since that moment last semester, I've been chronicling the lives of the family that lives there with a video camera.

I dove in without knowing what to expect. I wasn't the only one, of course. No less than three different professors I pitched this to warned me to "be careful." They all said -- some more jokingly than others -- that I should bring a gun.

It was at this point I realized that I wasn't dealing merely with an outdated symbol of the Confederacy; I was dealing with a powerful and common conception, even among us Ivy League educated, that we are a shining City on a Hill among barren fields of hicks with mullets who watch NASCAR all day and grill roadkill venison on their pickup truck radiators. I finally wanted to find out if these cartoons that we've come to accept as "the other America" really exist.

My grand project to get behind the stereotypes of rural America wasn't off to a great start when the door opened and I came face to face with a man, a mullet and the vicious guard dog he was holding back (but no shotgun). I realized this was going to be a bit more difficult than I'd envisioned.

No matter: He directed me to the house next door, which happened to be the residence of his entire family. Not one of the Cornell professors or friends I'd spoken to would have predicted what happened next -- that I'd be greeted warmly; that I'd be invited in, even as an unexpected guest; that the family would listen to my pitch to follow them around with a video camera; and that they'd send me off, wishing me well.

These people are not white supremacists who love Jefferson Davis and hate minorities, who want to send the all-American middle finger to people with dark skin by putting up the rebel flag. I've spent too much time with them to believe it's true. Otherwise, the daughter of the family -- art school, anti-Bush, dyed hair, goth -- would have been booted onto the street long ago.

At the same time, I've spent enough of my life in Southern states to know that the racist sentiments interpreted as the meaning behind the rebel flag are still alive in some places, even if they are pushed underground. That's true of an enlightened city like New York as much as rural Pennsylvania or Jackson, Mississippi.

But instead of trying to argue that this is not a family of true racists -- which the film will do better than words, and which would rely entirely on my subjective experience -- I return to the question I began with: Why do they have that rebel flag hanging there for all the passing cars to see?

I spoke to them, as well as many people who share their view -- that the Confederate flag symbolizes not slavery but a rebellious spirit, an identity of a people who merely sought to defend their homeland as it was being invaded by a Yankee army. This view was the one I'd stumbled upon in a Louisiana gift shop, peddled by historians far out of the mainstream of academic life.

Yet this view is prevalent among a minority of rural white Americans. They don't care that the big-city elites say it's a symbol of slavery -- and by most scholarly accounts, that's exactly what it is. They've taken the symbol back, as an identity for themselves. Not an identity of hatred, but one of self-assertion.

Even if misguided, I came to respect their choice of home decoration. After all, they'd been told for generations that it was a symbol entirely separate from the question of slavery, without the corrective influence of a Cornell history professor to intervene.

Even so, I can't help but feel a bit off guard whenever I drive past. Not because I know what the flag means, but because I know who lives behind it.

Andy Guess is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at guess@cornell.edu. The Last Boy Scout usually appears alternate Fridays.

[devolve]

Instrumental:

http://pro.lookingat.us/AnAmericanTrilogy-S.mid

Elvis vocal:

http://pro.lookingat.us/ElvisAnAmericanTrilogy.wav

My huge Elvis song menu here:

Same songs; different INTRO audio and top graphics - more songs added as time permits

enable Javascript for mouseovers

My original (top) Elvis mouseover graphic has 3 images instead of 2

Scroll to bottom to try my trick "Elvis Lives" mouseover photo animation graphic

http://pro.lookingat.us/ElvisLive.html

http://pro.lookingat.us/HoundDog.html

http://pro.lookingat.us/TeddyBear.html

http://pro.lookingat.us/BlueMoon.html

http://pro.lookingat.us/VivaLasVegas.html

[MeekOneGOP]

bump!

[devolve]

I knew you'd like Elvis' "An American Trilogy"


The more you listen to his music - the more you appreciate it


Elvis recorded over 722 songs - many that he wrote or co-wrote himself


My "Elvis Christmas" pages went over big in Memphis -


I had tickets for his Asheville, NC concert - the one he never made

[MeekOneGOP]

Rest in peace, Elvis.

Elvis Snowy Christmas Night

[lentulusgracchus]

The point is, if it is a symbol of "states rights" or "the South," that is simply not true.

Oh, please.

When WaPo scribbler Joel Garreau wrote his book The Nine Nations of North America in 1981, he used the Confederate Battle Flag (not the "Stars and Bars": that's the First National) as its emblem. He described, in his opening passage about the South, the reception room of a new factory owned by a German firm from Ravensburg. In that room stood the flags of the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, the ancient flag of Ravensburg, and a Confederate Battle Flag.

And Garreau's French-Canadian.

The Battle Flag is the symbol of the South, and it isn't yours to say differently.

[lentulusgracchus]

my understanding is the Stars and Bars is flying at numerous places in Mississippi.

Terminology check: You referring to the First National or to the CBF?

Personal preference is the Second National/"Stainless Banner". It really stands out.

[lentulusgracchus]

If South Carolina had taken the matter to the Supreme Court rather than opening fire on Ft. Sumter, the CSA might still be with us.

Two of the arguments used by the protagonists of secession in the South, as they tried to persuade others (and it was not a foregone conclusion at all until Lincoln was elected with control of the Congress), were that:

1. If the South wanted to secede, they had to jump before Lincoln was ready to jump them (as he did in Missouri and Maryland). Once Lincoln possessed the Executive power, he had indicated that he would pursue an absolutely uncompromising policy with regards to secession and use the many resources of the federal Government and Army to make it impossible for secession conventions to go forward. (Lincoln broke up a secession convention in Maryland by jailing the leadership of the State, both of the legislature and of the prospective convention.)

2. An appeal to legal processes would take too long. By the time the issue reached the Supreme Court, most of the sitting justices would owe their positions and their loyalty to the Republican Party. Secessionist apologists anticipated that Lincoln would nominate staunch abolitionists to the Court exclusively, and that is basically what he did, nominating Salmon P. Chase, one of the strongest abolitionist officelholders in America, to be the Chief Justice. Texas vs. White, an opinion written, or should I say invented, by Chief Justice Chase, bears out in full the secessionist "fire eaters'" worst apprehensions of a Lincoln-dominated Judiciary.

Which is exactly why Lincoln's defenders on these boards keep telling us that unilateral secession was unconstitutional, but that there might have been a constitutional and legal way to secede -- which of course wouldn't have worked, which is why they cynically posit it.

Their working motto is, "As long as your side loses, the requirements of legality and due process have been met, and all's well that ends well."

All very Straussian.

[dixiechick2000]

Thank you for the list.
"An American Trilogy" is one of my
all time favorite songs, and no one
does it like Elvis.

Your trick mouseover is very cool!

Thanks, again. ;o)

[devolve]

_{SUSPICIOUS MINDS}

[lentulusgracchus]

But don't go shouting "The South Was Right!" when most of us have real doubts about that -- to say the least. There's enough in the historical record to call the rebellion into question and disrepute.

Well, what if the South was more right than Lincoln was?

Lincoln and his party used the slavery issue to unite the disparate interests of the North and conscribe them in a political crusade against the Southern, agrarian, postcolonial economy and its champions, who were making a lot of money thanks to good cotton prices. How long that would have gone on is never discussed in these back-and-forth arguments. But Britain did eventually start cotton cultivation in Egypt on a massive scale, spurred by the wrongheaded Southern embargo. Without the spur of the embargo, how long would it have taken them to initiate cotton planting in the Empire, especially where fellahin were available to do the hard work?

But the larger argument is over constitutional versus consequentialist issues.

If the South had won the Civil War, you'd have lost part of the Union and the basis of 20th-century imperialism in e.g. the Philippines and Western hegemonism. That's bad. At least the second part is bad, because the U.S. has been a fairly competent hegemon of antitotalitarian politics and policies.

But you would also, with a lost Civil War, have discredited Lincoln's (Hamilton's) constitutional theories in the North, quite possibly, so that corporatism perhaps mightn't have become as entrenched in the U.S. Government as it did.

But even granted that you lose that argument in the North and Rockefeller's "age of combinations" takes hold nevertheless, still an independent Confederacy would have preserved much more of original intent, just as Hamilton and Montesquieu had theorized about conceptual "confederated republicanism" in Federalist 8. One of the advantages cited was that a tyrant would be less likely to succeed in a confederated state than in a unitary one.

So at least you have a survival of original intent, and if Lincoln's party is discredited, not just in the South but in both sections, that's good, even great.

If the South separates from the North, you also get the survival of slavery, which is bad, and possibly its persistence into the 20th century, which is worse, because now you have the Communists to deal with, and the disconnect between citizens' rights and the slaves' lack of them.

So the value decision is between a geopolitically solid Union that has lost its bases of just government and the consent of the governed, and a split-up republic which has to learn to coordinate separate foreign and defense policies just to be half as secure as we are now, but in which at least one-half still preserves the principles of government fought for by the Revolutionary War generation.

So which postulated sequel problem set is harder: persuading an independent South to give up slavery while holding off the tides of 20th-century totalitarianism -- but at least your principles are intact -- or getting back the surrendered principle of People's sovereignty and proprietorship of Government? Which means you now have to defeat and turf out an entrenched, self-privileging, self-enriching ruling class, the one David Horowitz and occasionally Bill Buckley and others write about, which deems itself the true and rightful owner and operator of the United States of America, which it is about to trade in on an international parcenary model which will very likely be run on clearly despotic and tyrannical principles by clearly tyrannical and despotic people. Which is very Not Good, from the clearly parochial interest of the People.

[stainlessbanner]

I read the Stainlessbanner is now flying at the front entrance at the Jeff Davis home

Hurrah!

[stainlessbanner]

I believe you posted to the wrong thread.

[stainlessbanner]

Great post, devolve! Thanks for sharing.

[rustbucket]

Sorry Rusty, yer new recruit already got hisself killed. I guess the joke's on you after all...

Apparently my fame precedes my posts on this thread.

[canalabamian]

RunningJoke wrote: I assumed that Stainless was the author. So now we have a poster that does not introduce the subject or article. This is why the world needs moderators. Did Stainless get permission to repost another's work?

Polybius wrote: Ummm...........Reposting articles with links and commenting on them is how Free Republic has functioned since 1997.

Thanks for amplifying that. I thought I explained it simply enough...sigh (shaking head).

[MacDorcha]

I'm back!

Thanks for the breather :)

[M. Espinola]

"His actions against Maryland are sufficient to secure him a place in history as a tryant."

Who cares! Enough already with this boring cult like idiocy, this is 2005 for Christ sake, grow up, there are real live enemies out who would just love to slaughter each and every one of us! They murdered more of our people in Iraq, or are even cognizant?

[Smoote]

And what if the south had voluntarily ended slavery before 1860? Would Lincoln have even been elected? Would there have even been a Republican party? Regardless of it's legal status at the time - slavery was an evil institution. And many Southerners, indeed many slave holders knew it.

"Thus ended the great American Civil War, which upon the whole must be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record." - Winston Churchill in his book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

[M. Espinola]

This is the flag Americans fly:

In case you had forgotten

[billbears]

Excellent post!! Thank you.