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 laugh every time I ... well I’ll just let it go at that.
The seeds of the Confederate States destruction can be found in its own Constitution. They took the concept of States Rights so far they were unable to unify completely for the common good of the new nation. The fact that on the day Lee surrendered at Appomattox there were 50K worth of complete uniforms in warehouses in Georgia is a perfect example of what I’m referring to here. History records the 26,000 plus surrendered in April of 1865 were for the most part shoeless, wearing clothing best described as rags held together with twine, and they were starving. Yet we know from Mary Chestnut’s diaries plantations (excluding the roughly sixty mile path Sherman cut through Georgia, South Carolina) had an abundance of food, drink, and anything else you could reasonably expect from the Old South prior to the outbreak of the war. The insistence on ‘States Rights’ kept the government in Richmond from providing for its armies in the field, via the respective Governor’s refusal to make held back stores available.
Slavery was used as a propaganda tool by the Union, no denying it. Why should that be denied? It was a war, and in war propaganda has always played a pivotal role throughout history. But you cannot get away from the fact the South refused, vehemently, to end Slavery, until the plantation owners/politicians in Richmond realized the ‘front lines’ had come to their homes and lands they held for generations. It was one thing if you were a Georgian watching Virginia be torn up repeatedly for three years, another thing when it became your state that was a primary battleground.
Did the South have a valid point about growing Federal power concentrated in Washington, at the expense of States Rights?
Yes they did. It still exists today (the basic argument), which is the single most compelling defense on its behalf in my opinion.
But they took it to far, and in the end it was their collective downfall. Had they ended slavery in CONJUNCTION with the creation of the CSA Constitution, North America today would look very very different, probably a half dozen or more ‘nation states’ akin to Europe in my view. England and France would have lent their support to Richmond, perhaps as early as mid 1862, definitely after Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863.
‘Died of a Theory’ is the best summation I’ve ever heard related to this. Its worth noting many so called ‘constitutional scholars’ running for office today make the same mistake in general terms.
Actually a lot did. There were two strong migrations connected with the war industries in World War I and II.
According to modern liberals, they were living amongst a group of racist KKK type whites who hated them, oppressed them, and held them down.
Which is pretty much true. Blacks down South certainly were not loved, and the laws and social practices that were enacted to oppress them and keep them in their place were well documented. Things up North may have been marginally better in some respects but still wasn't welcoming. So if you're hated and oppressed where you are, why move 500 miles for more hatred and only marginally better treatment in other areas?
Either the oppression blacks faced down here has been overstated, or the tolerant attitude of the folks outside the South has been overstated, or both.
I would say the second point. The tolerant attitude of people up North towards blacks has been overstated.
If Connecticut or some other Yankee state had had a mass influx of blacks in 1902, to the point that they threatened to become the majority in the state, and to dominate politics, do you not think the officials there would have thrown every obstacle possible in their path? Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, zoning laws? Not to mention that they wouldn’t have allowed that many to come in in the first place.
We'll never know.
Notice how they slither when you mention that and try to act like it really did not happen.
When confronted by Yankee racism/slavery ..they deny....kinda like liberals do about their utopia.
I just got back from Decatur Indiana at the Lingenfelter plant and I can tell you there are almost no blacks there.
Yet, these same folks wish to tell me who has lived most of my life in black majority communities ....how the world is.
It’s laughable.
Has anyone seen all the new evidence on the Manhattan slave digs....the most recent stuff. Amazing how many slaves came through there.
Shame of those noble hypocrites.
That book shows there’s always money to be made pandering to the inferiority complex of southerners.
Had they ended slavery there would have been no need for a confederate states in the first place. The fact of the matter is that take away every reason for the Southern rebellion except slavery, and the South still rebels. Take away slavery and leave every other reason ever given, and the South doesn't rebel. Simple as that.
An alternate title might be "War of Northern Aggression for Dummies".
I’m sure he is a devoted democrat.
Worse yet, blacks were a tiny percentage of the population up north in contrast to down South. What were the supermajority whites so afraid of that they would actually limit poor blacks trying to come there.....and then to impose all these restrictions on their freedom even if they did let them in? Were they skeered of them....maybe didn't want them mixing with their women....yep....they had their own anti-miscegentaion laws too.
This is just awful.....has there ever been a more hypocritical bunch?
As the abolitionist movement gained steam and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded, so did the backlash of negrophobia among whites in the North. State laws banning the marriage of whites and blacks, so-called anti-miscegenation laws, were passed in all the slave states and in several new free states as well, such as Indiana, Illinois and Michigan.[1] In several states the Black Codes were either incorporated into or required by their state constitutions, many of which were rewritten in the 1840s. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution stated "No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution." The 1848 Constitution of Illinois led to one of the harshest Black Code systems in the nation until the Civil War. The Illinois Black Code of 1853 extended a complete prohibition against black immigration into the state.
Notice how y'all hypocritically complain about Northern states while ignoring worse conditions in Southern ones?
When confronted by Yankee racism/slavery ..they deny....kinda like liberals do about their utopia.
Hardly. But we also do not pretend that such racism never existed or blame it all on the South.
“Would you List?”
OK, here is a few of many
Southerners led the way in drafting the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Northerners - not Southerners - wanted slaves to be counted as property instead of people in the Constitution.
It was Southerners who defeated the British at Kings Mountain and Cowpens, rikindling the shattered hopes of the Northerners who were growin tired of the war that we were not winning.
The expansion of the U.S. across the continent from 1830-1850 - which gave us the term “Manifest Destiny” - was largely a Southern achievement Lewis & Clark? Southerners,of course
The first two Jewish members of the U.S. Senate? Yep,you guessed it
Southerners outnumbered Northerners almost four to one among the heroes of the Alamo
How virtually all of America’s highest-ranking World War II generals had Confederate roots
The South was making movies before Hollywood.
The South is naturally conservative (and the North is naturally liberal)
Limited government and low tax rates are a Southern tradition
Northerners - white and black — keep moving South
It’s a fact: Southern women dominate beauty pageants, and Southern men dominate in sports
American jazz, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll (when it was still music) all came from the South
Blacks hold more - and more powerful - political offices in the South than in the North
Southerners are overrepresented in the military.
You are correct and we will never know what could have been. My only qualm is that history has been re-written and stereo-types my ancestors and many more as racist inbreds and is believed by many supposedly intelligent history savvy people many here on this forum and that is just not the fact.
Just like Bush will never receive one lick of favorable writings for the invasion of Iraq he will always be vilified no matter the outcome and the fact that WMD’s were there and went to Syria. Jeez look who won a peace prize for spewing lies and outright false claims.
‘Had they ended slavery there would have been no need for a confederate states in the first place. The fact of the matter is that take away every reason for the Southern rebellion except slavery, and the South still rebels. Take away slavery and leave every other reason ever given, and the South doesn’t rebel. Simple as that.’
It might not have occured in 1861, NS. It might have been put off a decade, maybe even two. But I do believe it would have happened anyway.
The flaw in your logic to me is you could not ‘take away’ slavery with the South succeeding. Legislation ending it failed to be passed repeatedly. The Supreme Court reaffirmed it obliquely in most instances, but directly in a couple (Dred Scott being the most famous example in my view).
But it would have taken place one way or the other in my opinion.
The frightening aspect of this is had it occured just ten years later, 1871 approximately, the machines of war were so much more efficent it would have been an even bigger slaughter.
Imagine Gatling Guns at Fredricksburg, or Gettsyburg, or Malvern Hill for that matter, on both sides. I don’t think the tactics would have changed from the Napoleon based format until a slaughter like at the previously mentioned three battles took place.
either way, this is one of the more facinating aspects for me, the huge ‘what if’s’.
Thanks Lorianne..........great read. Brings out my Southern pride......it’s gonna be a great day.:)
I think its probable history will be far kinder to the President on Iraq then the current talking heads indicate.
Consider how we view Lincoln today, or Truman, in 20/20 hindsight, for example. Both were reviled as much if not more than President Bush is today, Lincoln undoubtedly more so if only based on the draft riots in 1864. Bush hasn’t seen anything close to that.
The Difference In Football
Between the North and South
WOMEN’S ATTIRE
Up North: Chapstick in their back pocket and a $20 bill in their front pocket.
Down South: Louis Vuitton duffel with two lipsticks, powder, mascara (waterproof), concealer, and a fifth of bourbon. Wallet not necessary, that’s what dates are for.
STADIUM SIZE
Up North: College football stadiums hold 20,000.
Down South: High School football stadiums hold 20,000.
FATHERS
Up North: Expect their daughter to understand Sylvia Plath.
Down South: Expect their daughters to understand pass interference.
ATTIRE
Up North: Male and female alike: woolly sweater or sweatshirt and jeans.
Down South: Male - press khakis, oxford shirt, cap with frat logo, Justin Ropers. Female - ankle-length skirt, coordinated cardigan, flat riding boots, oxford shirt.
ALUMNI
Up North: Take prospects on sailing trips before they join the law firm.
Down South: Take prospects on fishing trip so they don’t leave for the NFL their senior year.
CAMPUS DECOR
Up North: Statues of founding fathers.
Down South: Statues of Heisman Trophy winners.
HOMECOMING QUEEN
Up North: Also a Physics Major
Down South: Also Miss USA.
HEROES
Up North: Mario Cuomo
Down South: “Bear” Bryant
GETTING TICKETS
Up North: 5 minutes before the game you walk into the ticket office on campus and still purchase tickets.
Down South: 5 months before the game you walk into the ticket office on campus and still be placed on the waiting list for tickets.
FRIDAY CLASSES AFTER A THURSDAY NIGHT GAME
Up North: Students and Teachers are not sure if they are going because they have class on Friday.
Down south: Teachers cancel class on Friday because they don’t want to see the few hungover students that might actually make it to class on Friday.
PARKING
Up North: An hour before game time the University opens the campus for game parking.
Down South: RV’s sporting their school flags begin arriving on Wednesday for the weekend festivities. The real faithful begin arriving on Tuesday.
GAME DAY
Up North: A few students party in the dorm and watch ESPN on TV.
Down South: Every student wakes up, has a beer for breakfast, and rushes over to where ESPN is broadcasting on Game Day “live” to get on camera and wave to the idiots up North who wonder why game day is never broadcast from their campus.
TAILGATING
Up North: Raw meat on a grill, beer with lime in it, listening to local radio station with truck tailgate down.
Down South: 30-foot custom pig-shaped smoker fires up at dawn. Cooking accompanied by live performance by Jerry Jeff Walker, who comes over during breaks and ask for a hit off your bottle of bourbon.
GETTING TO THE STADIUM
Up North: You ask “Where’s the stadium?” When you find it, you walk right in with no line.
Down South: When your near it, you’ll hear it. On game day, it becomes the state’s third largest city.
CONCESSIONS
Up North: Drinks served in a paper cup filled to the top with soda.
Down South: Drinks served in a plastic cup with the home team’s mascot—filled less than halfway to ensure enough room for bourbon.
WHEN NATIONAL ANTHEM IS PLAYED
Up North: Stands are less than half full.
Down South: 100,000 fans sing along in perfect 3-part harmony.
THE SMELL IN THE AIR AFTER THE FIRST SCORE
Up North: Nothing Changes!
Down South: Fireworks with a twist of bourbon.
COMMENTARY (MALE)
Up North: “Nice Play.”
Down South: “Dammit you slow sumbitch - tackle him and break his legs!!!”
COMMENTARY (FEMALE)
Up North: “My, this is a violent sport.”
Down South: “Dammit you slow sumbitch - tackle him and break his legs!!!”
ANNOUNCERS
Up North: Paid.
Down South: Announcer harmonizes with the crowd in the fight song, with a tear in his eye because he is so proud of his team.
AFTER THE GAME
Up North: The stadium is empty way before the game ends.
Down South: Another rack of ribs on the smoker. While somebody goes to the nearest package store for more bourbon, planning begins for next week’s game.
We don’t deny the conditions of the south we get tired of the north being absolved to the detriment of the south. How do you explain the northern governors’ meetings prior to the war and pushing for war and not once discussing slavery but instead the failing of their economy while the south was flourishing and openly talking about their hatred of the south and how they needed to be punished. 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. Those same governors are the ones who pushed hard for the north to occupy the south and punish her and when Lincoln decided not to and was assassinated ( I am not correlating that here ) and Johnson became president and was also not going to occupy that applied immense pressure until he gave in.
Being well traveled in our country I see more racism in the upper northeast and Great Lakes area than I do in the south.
A one note Johnny.
Racism is your end all notion. It’s not mine. Sorry.
Yankee racism is almost even with Southerners and to me it’s almost worse since Yankees had very few blacks to begin with and yet still mistreated them....even theough they were little threat politically
Down here, we have a lot of blacks....always have.
After the Civil War, blacks and whites (largely) have been in a power struggle ever since...and that won’t end in my lifetime
I do not think I would tie that accomplishment too closely to the glory of the Confederacy. A large portion of the Civil War descendants of those King's Mountain patriots remained loyal to the Union during the rebellion.
On the other hand, the ancestors of the South Carolina secessionists were often Tories. And that's not surprising as the Confederates were very eager to align themselves back to England and France to protect their precious slavery.
Over what?
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