Posted on 07/05/2015 11:52:30 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Everybody has an opinion about whether the Confederate flag is good or bad. They’re all dug in. Some are certain it’s racist and the very signature of evil. Others say it’s purely an expression of Southern pride and reverence for ancestors who fought and died a long time ago. Some of them have devoted careers and personal reputations to these propositions. A newspaper column is not going to change any minds.
The Civil War is a big bagful of ironies and paradoxes, and not a recommended study for folks who like to keep things simple. It would be a particular challenge for anyone to survive the 1860s in Knoxville and either idealize one side or demonize the other. It took a later generation, one that didn’t remember the war, to glorify it.
I do want to point out something provable. Whether the Confederate flag is an irredeemably racist and oppressive symbol or not, the Confederacy is not “the South.” It is not “the South now,” certainly. It was not even “the South” in 1861. The conflation of the Confederacy with “the South” began, I suspect, as some tired editor’s attempt to make a headline fit.
People of European and African ancestry have been living in the South for 400 years. The Confederacy lasted for four years, about 1 percent of that time. And even during that 1 percent, a large proportion of the people who lived in the South—perhaps even a majority—were skeptical of the Confederacy.
The Confederacy was a brief experiment in a cobbled-together government offering more power to the states than the U.S. Constitution allowed, to judge by its Constitution, and with much firmer protection for the perpetuation of slavery. The Confederacy existed only during a desperate and costly war. You would not expect it to be a very efficient organization, and it was not.
The Confederacy was not universally popular, even in the South. It would be difficult to prove that as much as half the people who lived in the South in 1861 were fond of the Confederacy. Sam Houston, who grew up in East Tennessee and spent his entire life in the South—except when he was in D.C., representing Southern states in Congress—despised the Confederacy and denounced it publicly. David Glasgow Farragut and Gen. William Sanders—whose last names survive in multiple institutions in Knox County—both grew up in the South and fought against the Confederacy. Sanders, who’d spent most of his life in Kentucky and Mississippi, was killed by Confederate bullets. Several of Knoxville’s fiercest Unionists, Parson W.G. Brownlow, William Rule, and Thomas Humes, were lifelong Southerners.
It might take years to do a thorough study on the subject, but judging by what we know of those who favored secessionism or the Union, here in East Tennessee at least, Confederate sympathies didn’t necessarily suggest Southern roots. Many of Knoxville’s notable Confederates were immigrants from Switzerland, Germany, or Ireland. John Mitchel, probably Knoxville’s most nationally famous secessionist—editor of The Southern Citizen, which advocated slavery—was an Irish revolutionary Unitarian who’d spent several years in prison in Tasmania and never laid eyes on the South until 1853. J.G.M. Ramsey, the secessionist most influential locally, was from a Pennsylvania family. Father Abram Ryan, Knoxville’s “Poet-Priest of the Confederacy,” grew up in Maryland and Missouri, son of Irish immigrants. Thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom had never seen the South, were Confederate sympathizers.
Meanwhile, many of Knoxville’s Unionists grew up in multi-generational Tennessee families. Did Southern heritage even play a role in affiliation with the Confederacy? Here in Knoxville, a demographic study might even prove the opposite. Maybe it was the people with the deepest roots here who were most skeptical of the noisy rebel bandwagon.
In any case, in 1861 more than 30 percent of Tennessee’s Southerners voted against secession, against joining the Confederacy. Well over 30,000 Tennesseans took up arms against the Confederacy.
Those were the white males, of course. They’re the ones who could vote and enlist. In fact, all the people I’ve discussed so far were white males. We don’t often know what women thought. They weren’t allowed to vote, here or in the North. Some women were fierce believers, there’s no question. Locally, Ellen Renshaw House, a 19-year-old Knoxvillian, left a scathing diary about Union occupation, published as A Very Violent Rebel. And I do know of some cases here in which the husband was a Unionist but the wife was a Confederate. But a lot of the rhetoric of 1861 was about manliness, and it’s hard to know how much of that motive translated to those Southerners lacking a Y chromosome. We know from letters that a lot of other women were tired of the whole foolishness and praying the war would be over soon.
And we can’t assume that most slaves and free blacks, who made up about 40 percent of the South, thought of themselves as Confederates. South Carolina, for example, was the white-hot core of the secessionist movement, the nucleus of the Confederacy. More than half of South Carolinians in 1860 were African-American. They were Southerners, but they did not get to vote.
If all Southerners had been allowed to vote in 1860, would we ever have heard of the Confederacy? Considering its existence was bitterly controversial even among white Southern males, I’m thinking not.
There’s something the opposite poles in the flag debate have in common. When they talk about the South, exalting and glorifying the South or ridiculing and berating the South, they’re talking about “the South” as if it’s only white people.
The South is everybody who lives here. And considering its African-American population, it may be a more cosmopolitan region than any other. African-American culture has pervaded and energized and inspired the South, its music, its cuisine, its literature, more thoroughly than that of any other region on the continent. Blacks may be the largest part of what makes the South the South, and different from all other places. Any symbol that does not acknowledge that fact can’t say much about the South that’s true.
Good or Bad doesn’t enter into it.
The CFB simply was. And is.
Assigning a value to it is ridiculous.
Just another carpetbagger trying to define us and tell us what we ought to do.
War has a habit of putting people on sides they don’t want to be on.
There are moments when I only half-jokingly refer to the civil war as the North’s Irish immigrants VS. the south’s Irish immigrants. I also refer to the space race as America’s captured German scientists VS. The Soviet Union’s captured German scientists.
CC
The Confederacy was a brief experiment in a cobbled-together government offering more power to the states than the U.S. Constitution allowed,
LOL
There were more copperheads in just Ohio than Unionist in east Tennessee.
There is some potential hilarity here.
You know how the left is filled to the brim with apologetic for Islam, “the religion of peace”, in that “most Muslims are peaceful”?
The same applies to southerners during the Confederacy.
The entire South had about 9 million people, and only 1 million fought for the South. The other 8 million southerners, the vast majority, were thus “peaceful”.
Still are.
So, this gentleman is brushing broad-stroke assertions about the South and the Confederacy based on his narrow research on folks from Eastern Tennessee?
Uncle Remus and his tales of Br’er Rabbit, the whole “Song of the South” popularized in the Disney film, was something of a prettification and romantic gloss-over of the what made up much of “the rest of the story”, as it related to the daily lives of the “non-voting” residents of what was once known as “the Confederacy”.
The “South” had a pretty diverse population at the time, perhaps more so than any of the Northern states, as there was also a large and fairly well integrated Indian population (the Cherokee, the Creeks, the Choctaw, the Seminole, and the Chickasaw tribes), considered to be the “five civilized tribes”. And many of these contributed manpower to the war effort of the South, being excellent scouts and guerrilla fighters in the wilderness areas.
The North, on the other hand, treated many of the other Indian tribes rather shabbily, before and after the Civil War, relocating a number of tribes forcibly out of New York and Pennsylvania, and waging open warfare with almost every one of the Plains and Western tribes.
You know, the black slaves had it a lot less rough in most instances, even for the freed slaves after Reconstruction. While there may have been individual persecutions of blacks, there was nothing like the genocide that had been practiced against many of the Indians, as they were removed again and again to places remote from their ancestral homes.
And no, I am not Ward Churchill, or even Elizabeth Warren.
This guy is of the Knoxville History Project. That is just stupid. The south has been over run by carpetbaggers.
I’d expect a little more elaboration out of a claim like this.
The Confederacy did have a bad vice of chattel slavery, as did much of the United States from which it carved itself out.
My personal take on one spiritual, some might metaphorize it as “karmic,” factor that doomed it: it was asking God to be free when it was refusing to allow that same favor to a large group of its residents (and to a much worse degree than Revolutionary era America). If hypothetically it had turned its slaves into freedmen at the same point as declaring independence, it might have found those men to be a boon, rather than a bane, to it.
Allowed? The Constitution restricted. It did not allow. It restricted the power of the federal government. At least it used to. Now gay marriage and abortion have been ‘found’ in the constitution, and the bearing arms and free speech is no longer there, apparently.
I think it’s likely that people in the states west of the Appalachians were less likely to view the state as their “country” than those in the original 13 colonies. They had after all moved from one state to another, often several times, and didn’t consider themselves to have changed “countries” when they did. I know that’s true of Northerners like Lincoln and Grant, and I suspect it was true of many Southerners too.
It would also have lost its reason for leaving.
It’s in the past; we have to live in the now! My great-great grandfather was a Rebel at Shiloh; then, my Daddy, an AMERICAN, went off to N. Africa in WWII, fought in combat in Italy & Germany, was hot on Hitler’s hind-end even as Hitler took the coward’s way out & committed suicide in Berlin rather than stand & take responsibility for what he had done to the world. That is how history works; eventually God has the last word.
One of the things that is true of the Civil War- it was more divisive than people think. The region of the Appalachian Mountains in the South(East Tennessee, Western NC, and SW VA) was largely Union in its sympathies, and often resisted the Confederate draft of 1862 by evasion or joining the Union army. There was a lot of fighting between local groups who favored one side or the other, and toward the end of the war a lot of chaos by armed men who served no side save their own. The Hatfield-McCoy feud is said to have some of its roots in the Civil War, for example. In any case, other than a few articles and the movie “Cold Mountain” it is not a well-known matter- largely glossed over because it doesn’t match a perfect blue-gray dichotomy.
Don’t you think using the term “genocide” is a little harsh to describe the undeniably unfair treatment of native people? There was never any official policy of genocide as with the Nazi policy toward Jews, and it seems to me that conflating the two serves the leftist goal of discrediting the country and whites in general.
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