Marie Sweeney, blogging over at the Dick Howe blog, had a post on Virginia trying to make April Confederate History Month.
I think it is a topic worth more comments, so I commend it to you. Commenting over there is not dangerous. I know of no one who has been permanently maimed by posting a comment.
I am not particularly impressed with the idea of "Confederate History Month". On the other hand, we do need to come to some accommodation with our past—and not the one that existed as the old soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy passed on to their just reward. In its way it was healing, but it had segregation as its background. But, how do we understand the Civil War today? And what do we think of the side that lost the war, but won the peace, twice; first after reconstruction and then again after segregation ended and more and more people moved to the Old South for work and the weather.
Regards — Cliff
Perhaps instead of confederate history month, we can have treacherous oppressor month. Let's face it, but for the intervention of just about a hundred years, this would be about the same as having National Socialist History month in Germany. Maybe in another hundred years we can consider this, but the wounds are not yet healed.
ReplyDeleteThe secession of states and the opening of the Civil War is a complex subject that has as many perspectives.
ReplyDeleteMuch of the bitterness expressed by "the South" was a by-product of the state's rights argument against the background of the pious cynicism of the Northern "Abolitionists."
From various sources:
Early 19th century New Englanders had real motives for forgetting their slave history, or, if they recalled it at all, for characterizing it as a brief period of mild servitude. This was partly a Puritan effort to absolve New England's ancestors of their guilt. The cleansing of history had a racist motive as well, denying blacks -- slave or free -- a legitimate place in New England history. But most importantly, the deliberate creation of a "mythology of a free New England" was a crucial event in the history of sectional conflict in America. The North, and New England in particular, sought to demonize the South through its institution of slavery; they did this in part by burying their own histories as slave-owners and slave-importers. At the same time, behind the potent rhetoric of Daniel Webster and others, they enshrined New England values as the essential ones of the Revolution, and the new nation. In so doing, they characterized Southern interests as purely sectional and selfish.
The attempt to force blame for all America's ills onto the South led the Northern leadership to extreme twists of logic. Abolitionist leaders in New England noted the "degraded" condition of the local black communities. Yet the common abolitionist explanation of this had nothing to do with northerners, black or white. Instead, they blamed it on the continuance of slavery in the South. "The toleration of slavery in the South," Garrison editorialized, "is the chief cause of the unfortunate situation of free colored persons in the North."[1]
"This argument, embraced almost universally by New England abolitionists, made good sense as part of a strategy to heap blame for everything wrong with American society on southern slavery, but it also had the advantage, to northern ears, of conveniently shifting accountability for a locally specific situation away from the indigenous institution from which it had evolved."[2]
Melish's perceptive book, "Disowning Slavery," argues that the North didn't simply forget that it ever had slaves. She makes a forceful case for a deliberate re-writing of the region's past, in the early 1800s. By the 1850s, Melish writes, "New England had become a region whose history had been re-visioned by whites as a triumphant narrative of free, white labor." And she adds that this "narrative of a historically free, white New England also advanced antebellum New England nationalism by supporting the region's claims to a superior moral identity that could be contrasted effectively with the 'Jacobinism' of a slave-holding, 'negroized' South."
Webster "articulated a clear and compelling vision of an American nation made up of the union of northern and western states, bonded by an interpretation of the origin and meaning of the union and the U.S. Constitution and reflecting the core values of New England political culture and history. Coded implicitly among those essential values were claims to historical freedom and whiteness, against which Webster could effectively contrast a South isolated by its historical commitment to slavery. Such an interpretation, appealing as it did to the widespread desire among northern states outside New England to eradicate their black populations and achieve a 'whiteness' like that of New England, could rally and solidify northern opposition to Slave Power."[3]
This allows him to keep within the frame of the Constitution, and at the same time cleverly disavow more than a century and a half of New England slavery and slave-trading, which had financed the first families and institutions of his home district.
Citations to accompany the other post of mine.
ReplyDelete1. "Liberation," Jan. 8, 1831.
2. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England 1780-1860, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998, pp. 222-223.
3. ibid., p.230.
Remember where Lowell got all of its cotton from at the start of the Industrial Revolution?
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't grown in the surrounding farms of Chelmsford and Billerica.
If mills were run by slaves rather then young women and immigrants for cheap labor, would we celebrate Lowell's history differently with shame/guilt?
From Wiki
In the 1836 strike, this theme returned in a protest song:
Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I'm so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.[17]
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Acknowledging/Celebrating Southern History fine, since is may encompass the negative with the positive, but labeling it as Confederate History sends a bias intent of sweeping slavery under the rug.
Perhaps Renee, but sweeping their heritage of slavery under the rug just like New England did? Isn't that a bit disingenuous? The north gets away with massive historical revision, but we then deny that same perogative to the south because the north did it first?
ReplyDeleteMind you, I am not for slavery, but to difuse the bitterness that still continues to this day, it is time for the north to finally admit to itself first and the rest of the nation second that it was complicit, if not a leader, in the cultivation of slavery in the US.
And, there are many forms of "slavery" that have occurred over time....ever hear of "the company store" where they sold you necessities at prices that exceeded your pay, so you were always indebted to the country store.
I just resent the north playing the "look, we have clean hands" card because we were on the side of freedom....and we were Puritan.
So before anyone get on their pious pony and look down on VA for celebrating Confederate Week or Month or Day.....they need to review "northern" history first.
As my third grade teacher admonished us, "When you point your finger in accusation, notice that four of your fingers are pointed back at you."