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 look forward to your opinings on the yankee slave trade and northern racism
be sure to ping me.
To: Lorianne
Yes. Unfortunatly you southerners should know that the CBF has been the flag of choice for Yankee racists in places like central PA and Wisconsin for at least three decades now. I think you guys should start telling these folks to stop stealing your flag.
6 posted on 10/11/2007 5:20:29 PM CDT by Clemenza (Rudy Giuliani, like Pesto and Seattle, belongs in the scrap heap of '90s Culture) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies | Report Abuse
I'm quite fond of Clemenza but he is no Southron mob member...lol
Non-Sequitur said: "No he did not. He did say that people for whatever reason and having the power could rise in rebellion and replace their government. That is a far cry from secession.
NS -- If rebellion is such a far cry from secession then why did the U.S. Congress name the official records "The Official Records of the War Of The Rebellion" in 1880. Many other names for the war were considered however they decided that the chosen name was most appropriate!
So in your own words you admit secession was rebellion. Thanks for reinforcing my contention that secession was rebellion in post# 183.
In Lincoln's own words he said that people for whatever reason and having the power could rise in rebellion and replace their government.
First let me say this is a non-pressure post. I have pinged you because of your interest in the Civil War.
I have completed a novel entitled Throw Away the Scabbard and am looking for a volunteer (no limit on the number) to read the manuscript.
What is the novel about? It tells the story of the war from Chancellorsville to its conclusion. There is one change... Stonewall Jackson did not die at Chancellorsville.
It is a book written from both the Confederate viewpoint and the Union one as well. The book centers around Jackson, but Lee and Stuart are main characters in the Southern side of the story. Jackson's aides: Sandie Pendleton, James Power Smith, and Joseph Morrison are strong supporting characters as well.
From the Union viewpoint, the story is told through the eyes of Hancock, Reynolds, Grant, and Sheridan. McClellan is also a strong supporting character as well
It is not a political book, though politics plays its appropriate role. It is mainly a book about the men in the field and the battles they fight. There is also a few pages dedicated to the aftermath of the war.
If you would like to read it, you will be receiving the third draft. I plan to do two more. One draft incorporating all the feedback I receive. The final draft will take care of all my grammar errors. (Grammar is a weakness, but I have an expert set to help me).
What kind of feedback am I looking for? What I did right, what I could improve... if characters wander in and out without explanation or purpose... those types of things. Anything that will help me strengthen the novel.
Please let me know by freepmail or just by posting to me if you would like to read it, or know someone who would.
If you would like to read it, I can either email you the manuscript, or I could mail it to you.
Thank you for your help.
That same phrase is in the real Constitution as well, but as the Supreme Court found that didn't mean unilateral secession was legal.
You listed war measures. None of those would have been sustainable after the war.
So actions such as that are permissible because the confederacy was at war? Then why do y'all complain about Lincoln for his actions? The Union was at war, too.
I'll be sure to do that.
Look back at the history of my posts on this subject. I've never called the Southern action anything else.
Excellent article and an excellent WBTS song below by Mary Fahl!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3PT5NUroxA
I wonder whether Lincoln had anything to do with the arrest of the Missouri fugitive slaves in Chicago. Perhaps I'm too suspicious, but Lincoln had promised to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and he needed to keep border state Missouri in the Union. Returning fugitive slaves to Missouri from the more or less sanctuary city of Chicago might have been useful in swaying public opinion in Missouri. Being an Illinois resident and lawyer Lincoln probably would have known some of the marshals.
Although the arrest occurred in Chicago, the slaves were quickly taken to Springfield for the hearing on whether they were fugitive slaves. The arrest seems to have panicked fugitive slaves in Chicago, who had probably thought they were safe from the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Why the arrest of fugitive slaves in Chicago at this particular point in time, when no arrests or few arrests had apparently been made for some time before?
Anyway, it's fun to speculate on whether Lincoln had a role in this affair. The timing of it would have worked well for him with regard to Missouri.
The following link supports the information in Campbell's book. Link
I also see that the New York Times has now started making available on the Internet articles from their old newspapers. Kudos to the Times. Here is one of the articles I had found on an old microfilm: NYT
Ya think?
Being an Illinois resident and lawyer Lincoln probably would have known some of the marshals.
In the first two weeks of April 1861 I think Lincoln had a lot of other things on his mind. I doubt he was aware of fugitive slaves in Chicago.
Anyway, it's fun to speculate on whether Lincoln had a role in this affair. The timing of it would have worked well for him with regard to Missouri.
You all would speculate on whether Lincoln caused cholera. Why should Lincoln worry about Missouri at that point? A popular referendum the prior month had voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Union. The state legislature was Unionist. At that point it wouldn't have been clear that the governor and a minority of the legislature were plotting to ignore the will of the voters and take the state out of the Union anyway. Lincoln had other things on his mind. But Stephen Douglas, on the other hand. Maybe he had something to do about it?
Oh we’d love to! Sam reads lots of alternative history and I just might pick at the grammer. :-)
Freepmail on the way.
With Blair from Missouri in his cabinet probably keeping him posted about Missouri and with the need to keep all border states in the Union? You'd have us believe Lincoln was the Alfred E. Newman of his day.
From the following site Missouri Before The War
February 28, March 4-9, 1861. Meeting first at Jefferson City and then St. Louis, the Missouri convention votes overwhelmingly against secession, but also passes resolutions condemning any effort by the North to coerce the seceding states.
Sounds exactly like Virginia. By your logic, I guess Lincoln was not worried about Virginia seceding either.
An excerpt from a book by Snead on that same site:
An event which happened on the day that Lincoln was inaugurated, and on which the State Convention began its sessions at St. Louis (March 4th), came very near precipitating the conflict in Missouri, and gave Blair [rb: Frank Blair, brother of Lincoln's cabinet member] and Lyon good cause to press their demands upon the Government.
During the preceding night some of the Minute Men (Duke, Green, Quinlan, Champion, and McCoy) raised the flag of Missouri over the dome of the Courthouse, and hoisted above their own headquarters a nondescript banner, which was intended to represent the flag of the Confederate States. The custodian of the Courthouse removed the state flag from that building early in the morning; but the secession flag still floated audaciously and defiantly above the Minute Men’s headquarters, in the very face of the Submissionists’ Convention, of the Republican Mayor, and his German police, of the department commander, and of Lyon and his Home Guards; and under its folds there was gathered as daring a set of young fellows as ever did a bold, or a reckless deed. They were about a score at first, but when an excited crowd began to threaten their quarters, and the rumor to fly that the Home Guards were coming to tear down their flag, the number of its defenders grew to about one hundred. ...
Everything betokened a terrible riot and a bloody fight. The civil authorities were powerless. It was to no purpose that they implored the crowd to disperse; in vain that they begged the Minute Men to haul down their flag. The police could do nothing. The Home Guards did not dare to attack, for their leaders knew that the first shot that was fired would bring Frost’s Brigade, which was largely composed of Minute Men, to the aid of their friends, and that they would also be reinforced by the Irish, between whom and the German Home Guards there was the antipathy of both race and religion. Only once did any one venture to approach the well-guarded portals of the stronghold. The rash fools that did it were hurled back into the street, amid the jeers and laughter of the crowd. Blair and the Republican leaders, unwilling to provoke a conflict, kept their followers quiet, and finally towards midnight the crowd dispersed.
You pick at the grammer all you want. For I am in desperate need. Desperate need. I replied to your freepmail first... Thanks a lot.
“The North made war on the South to preserve the union. Period.”
The North made war on the South to preserve the revenues the North enjoyed from the South. The South was not disproportionately taxed because it paid most of the federal revenues (which it did, because of all its exports), but because the vast majority of those revenues were spent and distributed up North. The South saw it is unfair that it should pay the lion’s share of the federal bill when the vast majority of those monies were spent elsewhere.
Kind of like today, huh?
“And let’s not forget that without the Southern slave owners snapping up every slave they could get their hands on then none of those ships would have left Newport, none of those bankers would have made the loan, and no insurance would have been written.”
Actually, the slave trade in and to the United States was banned in the early 1800s. The Northern slavers continued to ply their trade and sell their sad cargo to willing buyers in South America.
And what part of that supports your paranoid ramblings about Lincoln taking time out to personally see to it that half a dozen slaves got shipped back South?
Outlawed yes. But Southern syndicates were still shipping slaves past the blockade into the U.S. as late as 1859-60. Had the South won its rebellion and achieved independence there is little doubt that the practice would have continued.
The North made war on the South because the South had started a war by bombarding Sumter into surrender. Let's give credit where credit is due.
...(which it did, because of all its exports)...
Exports were not taxed.
...but because the vast majority of those revenues were spent and distributed up North. The South saw it is unfair that it should pay the lion’s share of the federal bill when the vast majority of those monies were spent elsewhere.
Fair enough, that would tend to piss me off too. So...how much was spent up North? How about some figures? What was the money spent on and what proportion was spent exclusively in the North and what part was spent in the South? Should be easy enough to provide, what with you being so certain and all, right?
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