That's What I Like About The South?

One of my favorite courses as an undergraduate in the early 60s was "History of the South." Professor Theodore Crane introduced me to several things: William B. Hesseltine, W. J. Cash, and green book bags. At the time that I was taking this course, I was asked — "Why are you taking a southern history course?" — and I answered that the South was going to be where the action was in this country before the end of the century. Before the end of the twentieth century, Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport surpassed O'Hare, LAX, and Kennedy as this country's busiest airport. Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston moved to the forefront as business centers by 2000. I have lived in Texas for more than half my life. I can't imagine living anywhere else. If this is (fair & balanced) prescience, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
washingtonpost.com
Rethinking the Confederacy: New takes on the losing side of the nation's bloodiest war
By Joseph Crespino

Capture the Flag

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address remains such an important document in American history because it was, in essence, the first history of America's Civil War, delivered a month before Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Americans all knew, Lincoln pronounced, that slavery was "somehow the cause of the war." Exactly how "the peculiar institution" sparked the bloodiest conflict on U.S. soil has been argued over ever since. In the years following Reconstruction, the desire for reconciliation among white Northerners and white Southerners overshadowed notions that the war had been about ending slavery and giving political rights to African Americans. By the turn of the century, white Southerners enacted (and white Northerners condoned) a system of legalized inequality and political exclusion that persisted until the 1960s. Conflicts that erupted during the nation's Second Reconstruction -- the civil rights era -- revived the fight over the meaning of the Civil War. And even today, some 40 years past America's Second Reconstruction, fights over the symbols of the war continue to divide Americans, white and black.

No symbol in the past few decades has been more divisive than the Confederate battle flag. In his important new book, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Belknap/Harvard, $29.95), John M. Coski shows how it got that way. The battle flag, though not the official banner of the Confederacy, emerged over the course of the war as the sentimental favorite among Confederate soldiers and civilians alike. Coski takes the story forward from there, but his most important contribution is his recounting of the tumultuous story of the flag in the second half of the 20th century, when the civil rights movement emerged, setting loose a variety of groups that made competing claims over the meaning of the flag -- and the meaning of the war.

Since the 1960s, Americans have fought over the public display of the Confederate flag. For its opponents, the flag is a symbol of both the 19th-century society that enslaved African Americans and the 20th-century reactionaries who opposed the civil rights movement. The flag's defenders have made any number of arguments -- that the flag represented not slavery but the defense of states' rights, that a banner that represented the South's noble heritage was corrupted in the 1950s by opportunistic racists, that a minority of the population should not be able to dictate the meaning of a historical symbol. Coski's book will speak to the flag's opponents as well as its defenders, but his most inspired message is aimed at those cheerleaders who insist that the flag has one, unchanging, fundamentally benign meaning. He shows that the history of the flag is simply too complicated for anybody to reach such simplistic conclusions.

The Confederate Battle Flag includes a mountain of research. Coski, historian of the Museum of the Confederacy, seems to have culled every single public reference to the Confederate flag in the past 55 years, which is the book's strength and its weakness. The depth and breadth of his research give his book real authority, and future disputants on both sides will have to reckon with his clear, reliable conclusions. But the final two sections of the book are repetitive, particularly as the author recounts the general history of the flag's use since World War II only to then go into more detail on individual flag controversies.

The Goat of the South

Jefferson Davis's reputation has been almost as controversial as the Confederate battle flag's. As Donald E. Collins points out in The Death and Resurrection of Jefferson Davis (Rowman & Littlefield, $22.95), at war's end the former Confederate president was persona non grata even in the South, the scapegoat for Confederates who felt that his heavy-handed wartime leadership made him the Southern leader most responsible for their defeat. But in subsequent decades, Davis's stock rose, and he became one of the most vigorous and beloved defenders of the lost cause. So when exactly did this resurrection happen?

According to Collins, a history professor at East Carolina University, Davis's tours through the South in 1886 and 1887 -- as well as the public sympathy surrounding his death and burial in 1889 -- were the key moments. Collins dutifully recreates these events from newspaper records, but he breezes past the first and most important moment in Davis's resurrection: his two-year imprisonment at the end of the war. Stories of a manacled Davis being starved by Union soldiers stoked the fires of Confederate sympathy -- so much so that U.S. officials decided to release him lest they turn him into a martyr. By that point, Davis may have been a chump to many white Southerners, but he was their chump, and they chafed at news of his mistreatment at Yankee hands. The resuscitation of Davis's career, then, both reflected and contributed to the revival of Southern nationalism in the late 1860s -- a process intimately connected with the overthrow of Reconstruction, the reestablishment of white Southern rule and the Jim Crow era.

What If?

Perhaps more than any other Confederate, Jefferson Davis reaffirmed white Southerners' sense that they had been involved in a noble struggle. Davis helped spawn a generation of white Southern men who sat outside the county courthouse, a stone's throw from the Confederate monument, and argued over how different things might have been if only Maj. Gen. James Longstreet had broken through on Little Round Top, or if Lee had never ordered Maj. Gen. George Pickett to launch his hopeless charge at Union lines.

No historian has thought through such "what if" questions as seriously as Roger L. Ransom in The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been (Norton, $25.95). The book begins with Ransom's "Recipe for Counterfactual History Pudding," mixing two parts historical plausibility with one part common sense and another part imagination. The culinary metaphor is apt; Americans have displayed an almost insatiable appetite for this sort of speculative fare, from the series of historical novels by Harry Turtledove to Hank Williams Jr.'s pro-Southern anthem, "If the South Woulda Won (We Woulda Had It Made)."

While Ransom, a historian at the University of California, Riverside, stops well short of Williams's conclusion, most historians have a word for counterfactual history: fiction. But there's a method to Ransom's madness. The best way to understand how profoundly the Civil War altered American and world history, he agues, is to try to imagine what would have happened if the war had gone the other way. We know that the Union's victory unleashed the forces that ultimately transformed the United States into the political and economic behemoth of the 20th-century world. But what if the South had somehow fought its way to a stalemate?

Ransom takes the reader through the individual battles that swung the Confederates' way and led to an imaginary, counterfactual truce in November 1864. As he dips back and forth between his counterfactual narrative and historical analysis, Ransom sheds light on a number of surprising places. He asserts, for example, that had the Confederacy emerged as an independent nation, the history of the American corporation might have looked very different; a defeated United States would never have enacted a 14th Amendment, which was passed to defend the rights of Southern freedmen but unintentionally became the pathway through which corporate America received a range of legal protections under federal law.

Unfortunately, some of Ransom's other analyses fall flat. He speculates that the South may have lost because it failed "to find commanders comparable to those who eventually emerged in the North." But earlier Ransom recounts the conventional wisdom that the performance of Lee's army early in the war was nothing short of miraculous. Also, the shift between Ransom's analysis and his fictional Civil War can be jarring -- as though, in the short space of a few lines, he hopped from the subdued aura of a university seminar room to the frontlines of a Civil War reenactment.

Ultimately, however, Ransom brings the reader back around to a safe, if familiar, conclusion: Lincoln was right when he said that the fight to preserve the Union was a struggle "not altogether for today." Above all, it was a fight for "a vast future" to be enjoyed by "the whole family of man." That's a lesson well worth remembering today. ·

Joseph Crespino teaches American history at Emory University and is the author of The Last Days of Jim Crow, forthcoming next year.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company