by Mark Behrend
I received a flier recently on the expected media attacks on Confederate heritage, I'd like to briefly share an argument I've found very useful in convincing critics that today's "politically correct" version of "Civil War" history is more revisionism than fact.
Rather than defending the Confederacy directly, I stress that the events of 150 years ago must be seen in the context of their own times, and that the moral failings of the South are more than equalled by the failings and hypocrisy of the North. To make these points, I simply state 10 facts. You're probably well aware of all of them, but the average American finds most of them astonishing:
1) Neither secession nor war would have occurred over slavery alone. As many of Lincoln's pronouncements make clear, the ONLY issue for the Union was union itself. For the South, slavery was well down a list of grievances that included the National Banking Act, a growing loss of influence in Congress, and the subsequent federal economic and trade policies that increasingly favored Northern industries over Southern agriculture. In a nutshell, the issue was whether states that freely enter a federation have the right to freely leave it, when it doesn't work out. As the next three points bear out, the North blundered into war by mistakenly believing slavery was the bigger issue for the South.
2) During the lull between secession and war, Congress passed a constitutional amendment, guaranteeing the South the right to maintain slavery in perpetuity. The amendment, of course, was never ratified, due to the outbreak of war.
3) After hostilities began, Congress made a similarly ignorant attempt to reverse events, with a resolution declaring that the war aims of the North did not include the alteration or abolition of any Southern institution -- obviously meaning slavery.
4) If the South's main concern was slavery, why did neither of the above end the conflict and restore the Union?
5) If Lincoln and the Union had gone to war to free the slaves, it would have had a hard time explaining why it financed the war partly from the proceeds of real estate worked by slaves, and why officers from slave states were allowed to bring up to 3 slaves onto Union military posts as personal servants.
6) Slavery was a pivotal issue for no more than 4 states (Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina), and arguably for only the first two. Four others (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) only seceded AFTER the outbreak of hostilities, and then only to keep their sons from being forced to fight fellow Southerners. Since Virginia would bear the war's greatest costs (a geographical certainty its leaders were aware of from the beginning), this clearly demonstrates that the intangible of "Southern identity" was of infinitely greater concern to the South than slavery.
7) American attitudes and policies on race in 1860 bore no resemblance to today's, and differed widely across both North and South. For example, Lincoln openly expressed doubts that blacks and whites could ever live together amicably... During the war, New Yorkers rioted against conscription, targeting blacks... A third of blacks in Louisiana were already free before the war, with a thriving black professional and artistic class in New Orleans -- a cultural treasure that was destroyed by war and Reconstruction... In neighboring Arkansas, on the other hand, it was not legallly possible to be black and free... A generation before the war, a bill to abolish slavery in Virginia came within 3 votes of becoming law... At least 7 Union states (Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana) had deeply divided loyalties during the war, with the first 5 of them still practicing slavery until AFTER the war... One of the biggest slaveholding families in the country, North or South, was a black family in New Orleans, which owned 500 slaves.
8) Blacks fought for both the Union AND the Confederacy. Though their numbers were far greater in the Union Army, they were paid at only half the rate of white troops. Blacks and whites in the Confederate forces, however, were paid equally.
9) Both North and South had a policy of taking no black prisoners on their own soil. Both sides summarily executed black soldiers caught on their territory.
10) Though our schools treat the Emancipation Proclamation as if it were Lincoln's intent from the beginning, he sat on it until well after the midpoint of the war. It was finally issued at the insistence of U.S. Grant, who believed it would remotivate an army and a nation that were losing their will to fight. And, in the ultimate act of hypocrisy, it applied only to Southern states. Apparently, slavery was a moral abomination in the South, but not the North.
As for celebrating our Confederate heritage, I cite 4 points ALL Americans should be proud of: We had the first ironclad warship, the first submarine, the first use of aircraft in wartime, and some of the finest military commanders in American history -- my favorites being Forrest, Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet, and Lee (in that order!).
