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.
I have no idea as to how many secessionists had Tory backgrounds, but the fact is that only about 15-20% of the loyalists left the United States. The vast majority--300K-400K--stayed. Moreover, many who initially fled returned in the years after peace was established. Once the war was over, there was suprisingly little ill feeling toward them, and in many cases they were able to reclaim seized property and reestablish themselves in society.
Of course, it’s easier to elect Charles Sumner when you don’t have to live with the consequences of his policies. I’m sure Detroit was filled with people in, say, 1850 who were horrified by slavery in the South and who were, relatively speaking, liberal on racial issues. Of course, Detroit then was a virtually all white town. When it ceased to be all white, the result was race riots. And eventually, the whites packed their bags and moved the hell out of there.
More recently, the nearly all white town of Lewiston, ME had an influx of Bantu tribesmen, and a town which had never had racial strife before suddenly had racial strife.
Blacks made no significant effort to move to these supposedly racially tolerant places such as Vermont after Reconstruction because the white folks there weren’t any more tolerant at all once blacks actually started showing up. They did move to some large northern cities when industrial jobs became plentiful. They fought it out with the whites, and when the whites found out that the political powers-that-be, and the media and the courts, were going to side with the blacks, they simply moved to another part of town or left the city entirely.
The laws of economics do not change over time.
Here is DiLorenzo quoting from and Economics Textbook on the subject:
It has long been understood by economists that import tariffs impose a disproportionate burden on export-dependent regions. And even McPherson admits that the South in 1860 exported about 60 percent of what it produced (others have estimated it as being closer to 75 percent). As Wilson Brown and Jan Hogendorn explain in their popular textbook, International Economics (p. 121), a tax on imports is effectively a tax on exports as well. This is because after a tariff causes the price of certain goods to rise,
. . . consumers . . . include the . . . price increases in their wage and salary demands. Everybody tries to pass the tax to someone else. The only group that is powerless to pass the costs on further are the exporters, who have to sell at world prices and swallow these costs. In essence, a tax on imports becomes a tax on exports (emphasis added).International trade economists call this the "pass-through effect" of a tariff. Unlike McPherson and Poulter, early nineteenth century Southerners understood this perfectly well because they observed how their incomes fell whenever tariff rates rose. As John C. Calhoun explained in a September 1, 1828 letter to Micah Sterling of Watertown, New York regarding his opposition to the Tariff of Abominations, a protectionist tariff "gives to one section [the North] the power of recharging . . . the duty, while to the other [the South] it is a pure unmitigated burden." This is so, wrote Calhoun, because the South "was engaged in cultivating the great staples of the country for a foreign market, in a market where we can receive no protection, and where we cannot receive one cent more to indemnify us for the heavy duties we have to pay as consumers" (Clyde Wilson, ed., The Essential Calhoun, p. 190).
Something that was possible only because all the Southern senators were off revolting. Had they been in office, the Morrel Tariff would not have passed.
But the upper south didn't grow much cotton and did not secede until Lincoln launched a war and began demanding troops from them. There had always been a few southern senators and congressmen who voted in favor tariffs in the past. The Morrel Tariff was going to pass either way. The election of 1860 made that a certainty.
As Wilson and Hogendorn further explain:
As tariffs cause imports to fall, less foreign exchange is needed to purchase them and the demand for foreign currency declines. The domestic currency will thus rise in value on the foreign exchange market. Exporters find that their foreign-currency earnings purchase less domestic currency and therefore they suffer.
Milton and Rose Friedman explain how tariffs discriminate against exporters and export-dependent regions on an even more fundamental level in their bestseller, Free to Choose (Avon paperback, 1980, p. 38):
If tariffs are imposed on, say, textiles, that will add to output and employment in the domestic textile industry. However, foreign producers who no longer can sell their textiles in the United States earn fewer dollars. They will have less to spend in the United States. Exports will go down to balance decreased imports. Employment will go up in the textile industry, down in the export industries. And the shift of employment to less productive uses will reduce total output.
I read Free to Choose when it came out. And again I will point out the danger of applying 20th century theory to 19th century economies which were not as advanced. In 1860 the British textile industry had no peer in the world. They dominated production, even with U.S. protections, and in order to continue that level of production they needed the raw materials, cotton. The world’s greatest producer at that time was the U.S. and we exported more than 3 million bales per year, almost all of them to Britain. There are no statistics that I’ve ever seen that indicates that the tariff laws in effect ever impacted Southern cotton growers, quite the opposite. Cotton exports had been growing year after year in a virtually unbroken span dating to long before the rebellion.
About 100K Tories were deported according to Rothbard - and deported is probably the most appropriate word for it. Most of this happened in the north with about 30K being expelled from New York alone.
Nathaniel Green, the general from Rhode Island was given a confiscated plantation in South Carolina - where he died of a heat stroke.
In the treaty of Paris we explicitly agreed not to take reprisals against the Tories.
In His Excellency, Joseph Ellis describes George Washington's struggle with the slavery issue. He opposed slavery in principle, and also felt that having slaves was more of a burden than a boon to his bottom line.
Washington would not sell his slaves, thus perpetuating the trade; he would do nothing that would split up families; and he would not turn out those who were injured or elderly, unable to fend for themselves. Washington's own slaves were extensively intermarried with slaves belonging to the Custis estate, over whom he had no control.
That's what I gleaned from a recent best-seller by a famous biographer -- no need to go hunting through obscure tomes.
The inefficiency of slave labor was one reason of several that Washington turned Mount Vernon from a cotton plantation to a diversified farm. I'm sure other families struggled through similar economic and moral calculations.
Chattel slavery on big cotton plantation wasn't the only face of slavery -- but it did exist, and it was brutal, and it was a driving force behind secession. Your point is well-taken that slavery, like most issues in history, was much more multi-faceted and complex than grade school books do, or indeed can, cover; but in pointing out that complexity, I wouldn't want to minimize the wrongs inherent in slavery.
And that is absolute bullsh*t. Most domestic groups cannot pass along costs either, contrary what Tommy claims. The worker cannot get a raise merely because he uses imported goods. The wheat farmer cannot charge more for his wheat than the farmer down the road merely because he uses imported goods. The coal miner cannot charge more for his coal because he uses imported shovels. All are at the mercy of the market and take what the market is paying, imports or no imports. So the tariff will screw everyone equally. Tommy twists economic theory to support his agenda.
But the upper south didn't grow much cotton and did not secede until Lincoln launched a war and began demanding troops from them.
You have that backwards. The South launched the war, the North merely fought the war that had been forced on them.
The Morrel Tariff was going to pass either way. The election of 1860 made that a certainty.
Nonsense. It had been defeated in the Senate the year before. Democrats still held the majority in the Senate. The Morrel tariff could have been defeated again.
I don’t understand your point about 19th century economics vs. 21st century economics. The laws of economics don’t change. If you mean their understanding of economics wasn’t as good as ours it today then I would disagree. I think public figures had a much better understanding of economic principles then than our beloved senators do today. Besides, southerners knew when their income was going up or down and it always went down when there was a tariff.
They do to a certain extent depending on how evolved the economy is.
Besides, southerners knew when their income was going up or down and it always went down when there was a tariff.
Again, complete nonsense. There had been a tariff of one form or another almost from the first days of the Republic. There was certainly a tariff in place in the 10 years prior to the rebellion and their income have gone up and up and up. Cotton prices rose steadily. Imports increased almost every year.
It's not DiLorenzo's quote. It's from an international economics textbook.
Prices rise all across the economy as a result of a protectionist tariff. Some can recoup the cost of the tariff and some cannot. Why do you think the southerners complained so bitterly about the tariff?
You have that backwards. The South launched the war, the North merely fought the war that had been forced on them.
How did the south force the north to do anything? The war could have ended and both sides could have had peace anytime the northerners decided to go home. The south wanted independence and was not threatening the north.
Nonsense. It had been defeated in the Senate the year before. Democrats still held the majority in the Senate. The Morrel tariff could have been defeated again
Says you. But they obviously thought otherwise.
Don't you think it matters how much the tariff is?
I haven't seen anything that indicated that it did.
Too late. It's been stolen, and it will take generations to shed that baggage. I don't fly the confederate flag, and I supported the drive to remove it from the flag of Georgia, my home state -- I have no objection to the flag in historical context, such as over a war memorial or on the graves of confederate dead, including my ancestors.
I know these threads always devolve into a beginning-to-end rehash of the War of Northern Aggression, and I'm not much interested in getting into that. My belief that the CBF is not a suitable symbol for a state flag, or to fly over a statehouse dome, is based on its use in the 20th century, not the 19th.
Let's not remember it if it's not true.
There may have been more slave ships sailing out of Newport -- how it compared with London, Bristol, or Liverpool in Britain is another question -- but Charleston (and later New Orleans) was probably the biggest port of entry for slaves.
Does anybody know the real facts on this?
Prices do not rise automatically as a result of a tariff. They will rise only in those industries that can pass the additional cost along, they will not rise in those that cannot. In a perfectly competative field those prices cannot be passed along. Farmer A, who buys an imported good, cannot raise his prices because Farmer B, selling the exact same produce and who does not by the import, will continue to charge the lower price. The same goes for labor or raw materials or what have you. In those cases the domestic producer is impacted just as much as you claim the exporter is.
Why do you think the southerners complained so bitterly about the tariff?
As near as I can tell it's because of the impact they had on domestic prices and nothing more. I've seen nothing that demonstrates that the South was dependent on imports or consumed an large quantity of imported goods, quite the contrary. But they were dependent on the North for what manufactured goods they did buy, and tariffs did raise those prices. But tariffs raised the prices for everyone regardless of location, so it cannot be said that they hit the South harder than any other region.
Well, yeah, you kind of do have to give a source for these things or people will dismiss them as conjecture.
There were meetings of Northern governors. But you'll have to prove that their motives were as you say they were.
The idea that if it wasn't about slavery it had to be about economics is a fallacy. There was widespread belief in both South and North that secession and the formation of a rival confederacy would mean a struggle for the border states and war.
There were also meetings of Southern politicians to promote secession and sedition. Why shouldn't Northerners meet to discuss possible responses?
Prior to the Civil War, the primary source of federal revenues was import duties. The Southern economy was based on the export of raw materials to the North or abroad, and the import of manufactured goods. Tariffs worked to the advantage of Northern manufacturers by directly raising the price of imported manufactured goods and indirectly propping up the price of Northern manufactured goods.
Northern states might have paid more taxes in raw numbers, but they also receive the benefits of 19th century protectionism. It was a straight-up economic controversy, neither side good or evil, and the South arguably had a legitimate beef.
I agree with most of your points against the pro-Confederate revisionist view of the war, but I had to take issue with that narrow point.
I would challenge you to provide a single quote from a single Southern leader in 1861 who believed that slavery was dying out.
I'm sure a number of Southerners felt that way, but it was not the mainstream view, and you couldn't win an election with it. Things were so tetchy in the run-up to the 1860 elections that the merest suggestion of any restrictions on slavery would have you burned in effigy in the South. They were demanding unrestricted expansion of slavery into the territories, and with Dred Scott, it seemed they had it.
It was Northerners and Midwesterners -- Lincoln prominent among them -- who were saying aloud that, if contained where it then existed, slavery would slowly die out. And it probably would have. With a skilled enough federal government in the 1840s and '50s, it might even have been possible to engineer a soft landing, but by 1860 the stitches holding the country together had ripped beyond repair and the seam was blown.
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