Confederates In the Backyard?

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It was at this point I realized that I wasn't dealing merely with an outdated symbol of the Confederacy; I was dealing with a powerful and common conception, even among us Ivy League educated, that we are a shining City on a Hill among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.

Hint: if you say you aren't going to respond, don't come back to take another shot -- it ruins the gesture.

The South in 1860 wasn't all one homogeneous piece. There were fewer slaves and slaveowners in the Upper South than in the Deep South, and fewer still in the Border States along the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio. That's one big reason why the Upper South (Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Arkansas) was initially against secession, and why the Border States (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) were even less inclined to secede. But in the Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas) which were the first to secede, the population of slaveowning families was highest, reaching close to half the White families in South Carolina and Mississippi.

There may be anomalies, but the general observation holds. People supported secession for varied reasons, but the thing started in states where slaves and slaveowners were a large part of the population. You couldn't have gone through or lived in most of South Carolina in 1860 without being extremely aware of slavery and the concern for its future.

I have posted on other issues. If I post more on history than on current politics it's because I'm more interested in history, shoddy historians, and liars than I am in complicated political questions of today. There are more than enough people posting about what's going on right now, and by the time I get to such posts there's not much to add to the argument. Maybe that's true of historical threads as well, but I do remember what I've read and learned, have had plenty of time to think things over, and am interested enough to look up what I don't know.

If you were a Republican in past decades -- a Landon, Dewey, Taft, Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole voter -- you didn't spend much time refighting the Civil War. Chances are you probably honored and accepted Lincoln's contribution. The same is more or less true of conservatives. There were too many other issues to worry about. Bill Buckley and others have probably come to regret their overtures to Dixie militants in the 1950s and 1960s and don't want to reopen old wounds now. So you don't have to be a liberal to question or doubt or be appalled by the latest wave of neo-confederate propaganda.

What's most appalling are the deceptions -- the need to make an important reason for secession and war take a backseat to whatever one wants to emphasize. You can stand on the sidelines and snipe at what you take to be the "official line" about American history, but at some point, you have to face criticism yourselves. People like to make the same tired comments about Grant or Lincoln or the Emancipation Proclamation, but they bristle when people make criticisms of their own views. It would be nice to be forever the critic and never have to face objections and counter-arguments, but it's not quite fair and life doesn't work that way.

If you are a Southerner you have something like 450 years of history, if you exclude the long centuries before the first permanent British settlement. And you've lived for a big chunk of those four centuries with the rest of the US. Some very Southern parts of the country -- like the Appalachian Highlands -- were deeply divided about secession or even opposed to it. Their ancestors were right to be skeptical about secession, and it didn't make them any less Southern.

Why focus on 4 years of bitter war and make them the basis of your regional identity? Why pick the period when we were fighting against each other, rather than the 230 years we've been together in one country? Why go out of your way to alienate and antagonize the rest of the country?

Militant Southern nationalists continually attack Puritans and abolitionists, Lincoln and Grant, and you expect the rest of us to simply keep silent? I don't suggest that Lincoln or the Pilgrims are above reproach. I could make a lot of criticisms of them myself, but recognize them as part of our history, and can respect them without thinking them perfect. Where does this need to believe that the Confederacy was above criticism and reproach come from?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.