Posted on 10/11/2007 2:41:12 PM PDT by Lorianne
Nelson Winbush is intent on defending the flag of his grandfather. It's just surprising which flag that is. ___
KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle.
The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag.
Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States."
His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt.
Winbush is also black.
"You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"
* * *
Winbush's nondescript white brick house near Kissimmee's quaint downtown is cluttered with the mess of a life spent hoarding history.
Under the glass of his coffee table lie family photos, all of smiling black people. On top sits Ebony magazine.
Winbush is retired and a widower who keeps a strict schedule of household chores, family visits and Confederate events. He often eats at Fat Boy's Barbecue, where his Sons of Confederate Veterans camp meets.
Winbush's words could come from the mouth of any white son of a Confederate veteran. They subscribe to a sort of religion about the war, a different version than mainstream America.
The tenets, repeated endlessly by loyalists:
The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.
But Winbush has a conceptual canyon to bridge: How can a black man defend a movement that sought to keep his people enslaved?
* * *
Winbush is one of at most a handful of black members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the country. He knows skeptics question his story and his sanity.
To win them over, he pulls out his grandfather's pension papers, reunion photos and obituary. He also gives speeches, mostly before white audiences.
Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.
"It was an exercise in rhetoric, that's all," Winbush says.
His views run counter to many historical accounts. Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III, the field operations chief for the NAACP, called Winbush's arguments illogical. Rivers spoke with Winbush by telephone a few years ago, intrigued by his position. Rivers remembers him being loud and sincere, holding fast to his convictions.
"I was courteous and respectful and respectfully disagreed with him," Rivers said. "This is America. He has a right to believe what he wants to."
At one speech, Winbush stood in front of the square battle flag that draped his grandfather's coffin, retelling the stories he has told so many times that the words emerge in identical iterations.
At the end of his talk, he held the microphone to a stereo and played a song by the Rebelaires, with a sorrowful, bluesy rhythm: "You may not believe me, but things was just that way. Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray."
Once other Confederates recognize that his story is real, they love him. Opponents often attack white Confederates as ignorant or racist. Winbush is harder to dismiss. If nothing else, the naysayers are more willing to listen.
"It kinda wipes out the whole segregation and hate and racism issue," said Christopher Hall, 29, commander of Winbush's SCV camp. "Coming from him, that really can't be an argument."
* * *
Winbush's views were once more widespread, even in the land of theme parks and turnpikes.
Florida was the third state to secede. Its Civil War governor, John Milton, shot himself rather than rejoin the North, telling the Legislature, "Death would be preferable to reunion." Former Gov. Lawton Chiles defended the Confederate flag in 1996 when black lawmakers asked for its removal from the Capitol.
"You can't erase history," Chiles said at the time.
But now neo-Confederates are losing this second war of culture and memory.
Confederate flags are coming down, especially from the tops of Southern statehouses, including Florida's in 2001.
The agrarian Bible Belt has become the Sun Belt, full of northerners with few deep roots in the area. Identification with the South as a region has declined since the World War II era, which united the country with patriotism and the interstate system. Areas of South Florida, for instance, are known better as the sixth borough of New York than part of the Deep South.
High school teachers don't preach the righteousness of the South. And historians, for the most part, agree that the Civil War was about slavery, undermining the standard neo-Confederate argument.
But Confederate loyalists are digging in. Winbush considers the South his homeland. And his family history, because it's rarer than that of white Confederates, is in danger of extinction.
* * *
Slowly, in his deep, rough voice, Winbush tells the story of a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a teenager with the sons of his master.
"They grew up together," Winbush says.
At first his grandfather cooked and looked out for the others, but later he saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and plantation owner.
At Shiloh, a two-day battle in 1862 in which more than 23,000 American men were killed or wounded, the Confederate Army needed a chaplain. Louis Nelson couldn't read or write, but he had memorized the King James Bible.
He stayed on as chaplain for the next four campaigns, leading services for both Confederate and Union soldiers, before they headed back to the battlefield.
He also foraged for food. One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.
"When you don't have anything else, mule meat tastes pretty good," he would tell his grandson.
Some topics even the loquacious grandfather considered off limits. He wouldn't talk about the Union siege of Vicksburg, a bloody battle that captured an important Mississippi River port and effectively split the South.
After the war, he lived as a free man on the James Oldham plantation for 12 more years. Then he became a plasterer, traveling the South to work on houses.
Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions, wearing a woolly gray uniform that Winbush still has.In photos, he stands next to two white men who accompanied him to soldiers' reunions until they were old men. Through the sepia gleams a dignity earned on the battlefield.
"When he came back, that was storytelling time," Winbush says.
His grandfather died in 1934 at the age of 88. The local paper ran an obituary that called him a "darky." Winbush is proud that his grandfather's death was marked at all.
* * *
Winbush grew up in the house his grandfather built in 1908, a two-story yellow structure with a wraparound porch in Ripley, Tenn. The Oldham plantation, where his grandfather was a slave, provided the wood in recognition of his loyalty to the family.
Winbush and his siblings lived in a family of educators. His grandmother and mother were teachers. He says he first went to school as a baby in a basket.
All three children went to college. Winbush studied biology in hopes of becoming a doctor but didn't have enough money for medical school. He switched to studying physical education.
Winbush moved to Florida in 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated school desegregation. Like many around the country, Osceola County schools remained segregated for several more years.
He didn't mind the divide because he felt both black and white students got a better education by not being able to use racial conflict as an excuse. When the superintendent, a friend of his, decided it was time to integrate in the late 1960s, Winbush agreed. The time had come, he thought, when people could accept the change.
Winbush thinks that people will get along if they know each other. He says he never suffered any blatant racism. The small Southern towns he lived in were familiar and accepting.
He remembers the "I Have A Dream" speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He respects King but disagrees with his reverence for Lincoln.
Winbush wasn't moved by the speech. King was just speaking the truth, he says, but it didn't change the daily reality of blacks.
* * *
Winbush's convictions about the war lay dormant until 1991, when the NAACP began an all-out campaign against the Confederate flag, saying it was a symbol of hatred. It vowed to have it removed from public places by the end of the decade.
Winbush saw it differently, and he was retiring. He no longer worried about what some "Yankee boss" would think.
"I got fed up about all this politically correct mess," he says.
He joined the Sons and started speaking at their events. He twice appeared before the Virginia Legislature to dissuade them from taking down the flag. He collects clippings of newspaper stories written about his speeches. One shows him posing in front of a statute of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Winbush acknowledges that misuse of the Confederate flag has made it a symbol of hate in some people's eyes. But he says the American flag is just as racist. Troops of color are sent to die disproportionately in American wars, he says, and the Stars and Stripes flew above slave ships.
Rivers, the NAACP official, said people like Winbush need to let go of their family history and admit that all people, even those now dead, are imperfect.
"Just because your grandfather was wrong does not mean you can't break the generational curse and not be wrong too," he says.
* * *
Winbush is the last direct link to his grandfather, someone who heard the stories firsthand and felt the passion.
He feels the legacy of Confederate soldiers like his grandfather won't survive unless the history is passed within families, from one generation to the next.
But it's not easy. Even Winbush's son, a Naval Academy graduate who works for IBM, once suggested Winbush donate his Confederate collection to a museum.
"This is the only way some people will find out what did happen," he said. "The history books leave it out."
Winbush knows he won't be around forever. He only hopes that someone will continue to tell the stories.
Times researchers Carolyn Edds and John Martin contributed to this report. Stephanie Garry can be reached at sgarry@sptimes.com.
Whites once had a racial consciousness equal to that of other races of people, but today they do not. Southern whites after the Civil War understood what would happen if blacks took power politically. Northerners did, too. That's why the Republican Party in the North largely didn't care that the South disenfranchised or segregated blacks after Reconstruction ended. Yankee Republicans would rather have the South run by Democrats, most of whom were pretty conservative, than to see the South turn into Haiti.
What they didn't predict was the rise of the welfare state, first under FDR, and later expanded in the Great Society years. Those events converted the black vote to the Democrats. That prompted Northern Democrats to suddenly wish to enfranchise blacks and to end segregation in Dixie, which in turn sent Southern whites into the GOP.
Today's massive centralized entitlement state thrives on "diversity", because the more "diverse" the population, the further the nation tracks leftward. That's why the Democrats don't want to control the borders. It's why the socialist parties in Europe want to import a zillion Muslims. Blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims have a strong racial pack mentality that whites no longer possess. Whites simply pack their bags and leave when things grow intolerable for them and their children, as they left Detroit and are leaving California. We have no NAACP or La Raza. We can't threaten to riot like the the Muslims did recently in Brussels.
What happened in the South after the Civil War is what happens when two races occupy the same territory and both races think in racial terms. What we see happening today all through the West is what happens when one race stops thinking in those terms, while the other races do not. Whites in Europe are "tolerant", the Muslims are not. Whites in the U.S. don't care what the racial make-up of California is, but Latinos do. And so on.
You would have to point out when this meeting is supposed to have taken place. I'm not familiar with it.
This came from a transcribed record of the meetings taken by an aide that were published a while back and immediately archived, but since I read it 20 years ago and cannot remember the name of the book it will be dismissed as conjecture.
And that is surprising how? We're supposed to take your word such a meeting took place and such conversations occured without any support whatsoever? This is the internet age with access to millions of sources at your finger tips. Surely you can find something out there that supports such a claim? And if you can't then why shouldn't we write it off as myth? Would you expect anything less from us?
Being well traveled in our country I see more racism in the upper northeast and Great Lakes area than I do in the south.
Again we are supposed to accept your opinion as definitive fact?
Over States Rights v a centralized, increasingly powerful Federal Government.
Remember while we discuss this there is nothing to indicate slavery would have ended without a war, based on my previous post.
And I've been watching you Southron types tap dancing faster than anything I've done.
Racism is your end all notion. It’s not mine. Sorry.
Hardly. Y'all are the ones who dredge up racism and blame it all on the North. I have never once mentioned Southern racism except when y'all try to paint Lincoln and the North with the racist brush. And then I have never once denied the existence of racial bigotry in the North, only pointed out that you are constantly condemning others for actions and opinions that you openly ignore among your own leaders and in your own region.
Slavery was outlawed in England before the Civil War.
Oh bull. Remember, we're talking no slavery. States right to do what? And what increasingly centralized and powerful central government? For 80 years prior to the rebellion the South had exerted an disproportionately high level of control over the government. Alexander Stephens detailed that control in a speech to the Georgia secession convention:
"But, again, gentlenmen, what have we to gain by this proposed change of our relation to the general government? We have always had the control of it, and can yet, if we remain in it, and are as united as we have been. We have had a majority of the Presidents chosen from the South; as well as the control and management of most of those chosen from the North. We have had sixty years of Southern Presidents to their twenty-four, thus controlling the Executive department. So of the judges of the Supreme Court, we have had eighteen from the South, and but eleven from the North; although nearly four-fifths of the judicial business has arisen in the Free States, yet a majority of the Court has always ireen from the South. This we have required so as to guard against any interpretation of the Constitution unfavorable to us. In like manner we have been equally watchful to guard our interests in the Legislative branch of government. In choosing the presiding Presidents (pro tern.) of the Senate, we have had twenty-four to their eleven. Speakers of the House, we have had twenty-three, and they twelve. While the majority of the Representatives, from their greater population, have always been from the North, yet we have so generally secured the Speaker, because he, to a great extent, shapes and controls the legislation of the country. Nor have we had less control in every other department of the general government. Attorneys General we have had fourteen, while the North have had but five. Foreign ministers we have had eighty-six, and they but fifty-four. While three-fourths of the business which demands diplomatic agents abroad is clearly from the Free States, from their greater comnmercial interests, yet we have lhad the principal embassies, so as to secure the world markets for our cotton, tobacco and sugar on the best possible terms. We have had a vast majority of the higher offices of both army and navy, while a larger proportion of the soldiers and sailors were drawn from the North. Equally so of Clerks, Auditors and Comptrollers filling the Executive department; the records show for the last fifty years, that of the three thousand thus employed, we have had more than two-thirds of the samne, while we have but one-third of the white population of the Republic."
The South, due to the 3/5ths clause, had a disproportionate representation in Congress. The could effectively veto any legislation in the Senate. They had no reason to fear govenrment. Instead the other states had reason to fear their control over it.
“I’d like to believe though that the Southland would have been less intrusive, clung to States rights and less taxed.”
Not to be contrary, but the Jim Crow laws of the South were only repealed about 50 years ago, and only after being dragged kicking and screaming by the Civil Rights Act. So who exactly are you talking about when you say less intrusive, and less taxed?
Ping
‘Oh bull. Remember, we’re talking no slavery.’
As I noted previously, without the war, you don’t get to ‘no slavery’.
Surprised you missed it, thought I was clear above. Kinda renders what you wrote here moot in hindsight, don’t you think?
The South didn’t view it the way the North did, nor as you seem to. Hence a war....
And over the strong objections of virtually all the slave owners.
I call BS. Your group can't come onto these threads without discussing slavery and or racism, attempting to paint all Southerners as knuckle-dragging klansmen. ALL colonies had slaves or participated in the trade at our founding, the new republic had legalized slavery, most states prohibited either the emancipation of blacks or the immigration of blacks into their states. Slavery had been a world wide practice, and still is practiced in parts of Africa, the Middle East and the Orient.
We're constantly told that the South seceded to perpetuate slavery, but slavery was guaranteed if they remained in the union. Congress had just passed the 13th Amendment which guaranteed slavery to exist forever. If the South wanted permanent slavery, all they had to do was rejoin the union, ratify and they'd have slavery forever - IF that had been their desire - it was not.
Then we hear that the South wanted to expand slavery. Slavery was a failure in the territories, with less than 60 such enumerated in the territories despites them being open to slavery for decades.
Most Southerners simply get tired of having a person we consider to be a dictator held up as the 4th member of the Holy Trinity, as IF he were the Saviour of the black race, despite his fervent desire stated in his 1858 speech at Springfield, '[w]hat I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.'
He paid black troops a little more than half of what whites earned. His Emancipation Proclamation did not free Northern slaves, and the seceded states were still welcome to return to the Union as slave-holding states. During the war West Virginia entered the Union as a slave state. When Louisiana was creating a new constitution, Lincoln advocated against universal black citizenship and suffrage. He continuously advocated for black colonization and separation of the races. He believed that the Declaration of Independence was for whites, urged for the resumption of slavery as a legal right.
In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we ``cancel and tear to pieces'' even the white man's charter of freedom.For Lincoln, a union of states with slavery was WORTH SAVING.Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of ``moral right,'' back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ``necessity.'' Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south---let all Americans---let all lovers of liberty everywhere---join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
You're being told that because it's true, and has been supported by numerous documents, letters, and quotes from the Southern leaders of the time.
As for the 13th Amendment, that wasn't passed until after the original 7 had announced their secession, so your claim that "Congress had just passed the 13th Amendment which guaranteed slavery to exist forever" is not true. And what you conveniently forget is that the 13th Amendment as passed did not address the major Southern bone of contention. The 13th amemdment protected slavery where it existed but did not guarantee it's expansion into the territories. The new confederate constitution not only guaranteed slavery throughout the length and breadth of the confederacy but also guaranteed that it would be in any territories the confederacy chose to acquire and that slavery would continue so long as the confederate states existed. So rather than choose the half a loaf offered by the 13th Amendment, it is not surprising that the chose to remain with the far stronger protections afforded slavery by their new constitution.
Most Southerners simply get tired of having a person we consider to be a dictator held up as the 4th member of the Holy Trinity, as IF he were the Saviour of the black race, despite his fervent desire stated in his 1858 speech at Springfield, '[w]hat I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.
And yet you hold up your Southron leaders as saints in spite of the fact that not a single one of them ever uttered or took a position on slavery or blacks as open as Lincoln did. Not a single Southern leader believed steps should be taken to end slavery. Not a single one thought slavery was in the way out. Not a single one every said that any black, free or slave, had any rights that a white man was bound to respect. So if you want to complain about the diefication of Lincoln, we're fed up with the Southron tin gods you give a pass on. How about Saint Robert of Lee or Saint Thomas of Jackson? Men who's opinions on the races were much worse than anything Lincoln proposed? Who believed that slavery was the best and proper place for blacks? You bring up Lincoln's "racist" views and ignore their's.
He paid black troops a little more than half of what whites earned.
Most blacks used by the confederate army were slaves and unpaid.
His Emancipation Proclamation did not free Northern slaves, and the seceded states were still welcome to return to the Union as slave-holding states.
And you know the reason why for that, it's been explained often enough. Lincoln also was highly instrumental in getting the real 13th Amendment passed and sent to the states. And once the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, then the Southern states could never have returned with their chattel intact, as Lincoln made clear at the Hampton Roads conference.
During the war West Virginia entered the Union as a slave state.
But with a Constitution that set an end to slavery. And which became moot after the 13th Amendment was ratified.
When Louisiana was creating a new constitution, Lincoln advocated against universal black citizenship and suffrage.
Absolutely false. The Louisiana constitution as written denied sufferage to all blacks. What Lincoln said was that he deplored that and believed that sufferage should be extended to at least some. Can you point to a single Southern leader who believed the same?
He continuously advocated for black colonization and separation of the races.
As did Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Robert Lee, and John Breckenridge. No condemnation for them?
He believed that the Declaration of Independence was for whites, urged for the resumption of slavery as a legal right.
Did he? "...but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Sentiments that every one of your Southron leaders would have found repulsive.
For Lincoln, a union of states with slavery was WORTH SAVING.
For Lee and Jackson and Davis and all the rest, a union of states founded for the protection and preservation of slavery was WORTH FIGHTING FOR.
Thanks Navy,,,
Looks like a good list to me..
DIXIE
To most people in the north, negros were an abstraction - something they heard about and read about and feared. This was particularly true in the Midwest. Ohio once enacted a law to expell the entire black population for example. In the south cruelty and arbitrary laws and practices were somewhat ameliorated by the fact that southerners had to deal with actual people.
Racism was, and to this day still is, more intense in the north.
There was. Between 1914 and 1950, 2 million blacks moved north. Mississippi went from 60% black to 35%.
Southern Illinois was rather similar to Dixie. If you look at the map you can see how far the state plunges toward the slave country of Western Kentucky and West Tennessee. It's no great surprise that those people would object to the presence of free blacks just as their Confederate cousins a few miles to the south and southeast would.
This is completely false. My own ancestors were on the right side of both wars. And let us not forget that Robert E. Lee was George Washington's Kinsman.
From Melville:
He who has seen the face of Lee
has seen the face of Washington
And he must hide the though
so fraught with grievous meaning is it wrought
Nothing except the history of every other western country.
‘Nothing except the history of every other western country.’
How circa 2007 of you to post this!
‘other Western country’ huh? In the 1860’s?
(chuckle)
FROH.
It is sometimes forgotten that West Virginia was created as a slave state by the north during the war.
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