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.
Answer the question. What course will you take?
“I don’t despise the confederacy any more than you despise the United States....”
You’re talking out your ass now, boy. I served the United States in Vietnam while I was in the USAF. I vote in every election, from the local library board up to the presidency. I will bleed and die for the United States, but not for a marxist government that has hi-jacked it. Such a government I will fight. That likely means I will fight you, since you sound like you will support ANY government just as long as it says it is the legitimate government of the United States. You’d make a fine bundist.
They had a fourth choice that would have been best. They should have realized that a Republican in the White House was much less of a threat to their liberties than a tyrant in Dixie and rejected the power grab attempted by a greedy band of slave owning aristocrats.
As the Southern Unionist Horace Maynard described the rebellion at the time:
"...the uprising of the few against the many; the assertion of the rights of property in disregard of personal rights"
Your “fourth” choice is encapsulated in the first choice I previously posited.
Cuba has said over and again that in their view the continued American presence in Gitmo is illegal, but allows us to stay because they lack the power to force us out. So the question remains, if they did take military action to force us out wouldn't they be justified in doing so, for the same reasons you all justify the bombardment of Sumter?
That will depend on what happens.
There's similarities to be sure, but my putting a fourth choice gave me an excuse to enlist Horace Maynard's help in taking a gratuitous shot at the selfish, power mad, tyrannical, slaveowning failures who foolishly led Dixie to ruin just because they couldn't abide not being able to take their two-legged property anywhere they wished.
shame on you for LYING. but then you are just a PROPAGANDIST for the most extreme lunatic fringe of northeastern, REVISIONIST, elitist, unionist academia & thus cannot be trusted to be bothered with the TRUTH.
free dixie,sw
Good grief! Why would a conservative say that about the South? I get frustrated quite often with liberal strongholds such as Massachusetts and let loose on the place, but even then it's largely out of a desire for the outvoted conservatives there to have better political circumstances. It's not out of a general dislike or indifference to the people there.
More to the point, why would I spend any time unleashing verbal fire on conservative states such as Wyoming or Idaho? Even though those places are far away from where I live, and I don't really know anyone there, the fact that they're conservative states is good enough for me. I wouldn't announce that I don't care enough about those states to either love or hate them. I love 'em for being part of America and for voting conservative most of the time.
Me and Rush. America's Truth Detectors.
I think Rush probably loves the South and thinks Rebel Flags are okay. He's okay with Lincoln, too, I'm sure, but I doubt very seriously if he's for ordering NASCAR fans to put away their Rebel Flags because such things are "racist" and only belong in museums, if they belong anywhere at all.
Have fun with your rebellion. Hope it turns out better than last time.
We're likely headed for another split, but it won't be because of Dixie. It'll be because of PC forces who have flooded the nation with unassimilated foreigners in an effort to create a multi-cultural society. We thus live in the anarcho-tyranny described by Sam Francis where a patriotic American can lose his job, get expelled from school, and eventually perhaps even do jail time, for waving a Rebel Flag as a sign of regional pride. But someone can ridicule the American Flag and wave the Mexican Flag as part of an Aztlan celebration and be coddled by the powers-that-be.
to all: i love it when the DAMNyankee REVISIONISTS are so clue-LESS & filled with HATE for dixie & her people that they don't even realize that their own links prove them to be DUMB-bunnies & DECEITFUL.
free dixie,sw
Along those lines, you never answered my earlier Detroit question.
So you are admitting that since the confederates chose to start a war in order to gain control of Sumter then the Lincoln administration was justified in pursuing that war?
Read before you post. I said Castro would have been justified, and for the same reason SC was justified. We would most likely have illegitimately used it as a pretext for invasion - as Lincoln did.
Can you not see the patent absurdity of subordinating sovereignty to a private property title?
The Yankees were occupying a cork in the mouth of South Carolina's most important port. Their president was publicly demanding tribute and threatening to invade if he didn't get it. And you want to talk about names on deeds.
Yes until 1830's when the British navy got serious about banning it. After that it was almost entirely an American industry.
The slave trade was banned by Congress in 1808. Illegal slave trading persisted. There were still some ships sailing into Charleston and an overland trade in slaves through Spanish Texas and Florida, but the business wasn't what it had been earlier.
After 1820, the illegal slave trade was declared an act of piracy punishable by death. There were still some illegal American slavers sailing from Africa to Cuba and Brazil, but little transport of slaves to the US, though there were efforts like The Wanderer's up to the Civil War.
My source admits that the US didn't cooperate with British efforts to suppress the slave trade. It says one major reason may have been national pride. We'd fought two wars against the British and didn't want to take orders from them. In any case, I don't think that American non-compliance with British demands can wholly be chalked up to profit-hungry Yankees.
It was not a private property title. Sumter was federal property. South Carolina gave up all rights and claims to the property it was built on when they deeded if free and clear to the federal government. I will repeat that they had absolutely no legal claim to it.
The Yankees were occupying a cork in the mouth of South Carolina's most important port.
The U.S. is occupying a cork in one of Cuba's busiest port. Do the Cubans have the right to bombard Gitmo into surrender?
Their president was publicly demanding tribute and threatening to invade if he didn't get it.
Absolute hogwash.
And you want to talk about names on deeds.
I'm talking about the rule of law. And I can well understand why Southron supportersd finds that topic uncomfortable.
And the Yankees love reading your stuff for the comic value alone. And FWIW I've got April 2012 in the pool we Yankees are running for the month when you actually post a something that is not only factually correct but which can be verified. Don't let me down.
The U.S. is occupying a cork in one of Cuba's busiest port. Do the Cubans have the right to bombard Gitmo into surrender?
Putting aside the question of the legitimacy of Castro's unelected government, yes, it's their territory.
Their president was publicly demanding tribute and threatening to invade if he didn't get it.
Absolute hogwash.
It's right there in his first inaugural speech. Pay the tariff and we won't invade.
And you want to talk about names on deeds.
I'm talking about the rule of law. And I can well understand why Southron supportersd finds that topic uncomfortable.
Lincoln never gave a damn about the rule of law. He suspended habeas corpus, threw opposition figures in jail without trial, invaded sovereign states which had not seceded and overthrew their governments.
What? No question on the legitimacy of the confederacy's unelected president?
It's right there in his first inaugural speech. Pay the tariff and we won't invade.
I've read Lincoln's first inaugural, and I highly recommend you do the same. It's not as good as his second inaugural IMHO, but it is very clear. "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors." And he was true to his word. Not an single aggressive action was taken prior to the confederacy's bombardment of Sumter. When we look at the part you are apparently thinking of:
"The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion -- no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality, shall be so great and so universal, as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating, and so nearly impracticable with all, that I deem it better to forego, for the time, the uses of such offices.
The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible, the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection. The course here indicated will be followed, unless current events and experience shall show a modification or change to be proper; and in every case and exigency my best discretion will be exercised according to circumstances actually existing, and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections." Lincoln is clear there as well. Sumter is the property of the federal government, and the federal government will retain ownership. The federal government will continue to provide the services it has always done - collect revenue, deliver the mail, etc. No hostile actions will be taken, in the hope that cooler heads would prevail. Unfortunately there were no cooler heads in the South.
Lincoln never gave a damn about the rule of law. He suspended habeas corpus, threw opposition figures in jail without trial, invaded sovereign states which had not seceded and overthrew their governments.
More hogwash. Lincoln's actions on habeas corpus may or may not have been Constitutional, the Supreme Court never ruled on it. But Davis threw opposition figures in jail, didn't establish a Supreme Court, implemented protective tariffs and, if stories be true, promised the European powers he would end slavery if they recognized the confederacy. All in violation of his own constitution. Yet nary a complaint about that from the Southern hypocrisy crowd.
He was elected by a constitutional convention. According to you that's the will of the people.
I've read Lincoln's first inaugural, and I highly recommend you do the same.
There it is. He threatened invasion if the tax/tribute wasn't paid. Like I said.
Not an single aggressive action was taken prior to the confederacy's bombardment of Sumter.
It doesn't matter what order things happenen in. Lincoln had no right to collect taxes from South Carolina after South Carolina became an independent Nation.
More hogwash. Lincoln's actions on habeas corpus may or may not have been Constitutional, the Supreme Court never ruled on it. But Davis threw opposition figures in jail, didn't establish a Supreme Court, implemented protective tariffs and, if stories be true, promised the European powers he would end slavery if they recognized the confederacy. All in violation of his own constitution. Yet nary a complaint about that from the Southern hypocrisy crowd.
Don't you ever get tired of defending ancient war propaganda? Davis was faced with invasion by a foreign power. And unlike Lincoln, enjoyed the support of most of his population for most of his actions.
And you can hardly compare Lincoln's jailing of 30,000 people whose only crime was to speak or write against the war with anything Jefferson Davis did.
He was the 4th or 5th choice of the secession convention, and later ran unopposed. Castro couldn't have done better.
There it is. He threatened invasion if the tax/tribute wasn't paid. Like I said.
Nah, he threatened invasion to deliver the mail. </sarcasm>
It doesn't matter what order things happenen in. Lincoln had no right to collect taxes from South Carolina after South Carolina became an independent Nation.
I'm not aware of any tariff revenue that was collected after Lincoln was inagurated. The confederacy started a war anyway.
Don't you ever get tired of defending ancient war propaganda? Davis was faced with invasion by a foreign power. And unlike Lincoln, enjoyed the support of most of his population for most of his actions.
Don't you ever get tired of the nonsense you post? Davis started a war, so that was a reason not to establish the third branch of government his constitution required, ignore the restrictions against a protective tariff, and offer to end slavery in spite of the fact that the constitution did not give him that power? Well, Lincoln was faced with war, too. Why couldn't he have bent the constitution a bit?
And you can hardly compare Lincoln's jailing of 30,000 people whose only crime was to speak or write against the war with anything Jefferson Davis did.
Mark Neely wrote two books on the subject: "The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties" and "Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism". After extensive research Neely's not only came to a figure considerably smaller than the 30,000 you claim but he also found out that on a per capita basis one was more likely to be locked up without trial in a Jeff Davis confederacy than in Abe Lincoln's Union. But of course you'll say that the war made that all OK.
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