The Confederate States of America lost the civil war and came to an inglorious end almost 150 years ago. Yet, this image continues to be a focus of controversy in American political discourse. It is used by southern conservatives to celebrate the legacy of slavery and the racism that has been perpetuated along with it. It is found in places ranging from the South Carolina state flag to the windows of redneck pickup trucks alongside the gun rack.
I grew up in Alabama in the late 40s and 50s. Jim Crow was still in force and I was raised to celebrate the Confederacy and everything about it. The standard line was that The War Between The States (you couldn't call it the civil war) was not about slavery. It was about states rights. I have relatives who are still beating the same drum to this day. These reflections were prompted by an article in the New York Times discussing a historical reassessment of Gen. Sherman and his march to the sea.
150 Years Later, Wrestling With a Revised View of Sherman’s March
To any number of Southerners, the Civil War general remains a ransacking brute and bully whose March to the Sea, which began here 150 years ago on Saturday, was a heinous act of terror. Despite the passage of time, Sherman remains to many a symbol of the North’s excesses during the Civil War, which continues to rankle some people here.
Yet this week, Atlanta became the site of a historical marker annotating Sherman folklore to reflect an expanding body of more forgiving scholarship about the general’s behavior. One of the marker’s sentences specifically targets some of the harsher imagery about him as “popular myth.”
“ ‘Gone with the Wind’ has certainly been a part of it,” W. Todd Groce, the president of the Georgia Historical Society, which sponsored the marker, said of regional perceptions of Sherman and the Union Army. “In general, we just have this image that comes from a movie.”
“What is really happening is that over time, the views that are out there are being challenged by historical research,” said John F. Marszalek, a Sherman biographer and the executive director of the Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association. “The facts are coming out.”
To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated “Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts” and talks of how, “contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.”
They didn't have to look far to find views expressing vigorous dissent with any effort to undermine the cult of southern victimhood.
Jack Bridwell, a longtime leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter in Georgia, was more blunt: “How they can justify saying anything other than that he’s Billy the Torch, I don’t know.”
The reassessment of Sherman comes at a time when the South continues to weigh how to recognize its complex racial history. Earlier this year, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights opened in Atlanta, the same city where Gov. Nathan Deal last year ordered the removal of a statue of an avowed white supremacist from the grounds of the State Capitol. (Officials said that the relocation of Thomas E. Watson’s likeness was to accommodate a construction project and that the state could not afford to return the statue to its former position.)
But the Confederate battle emblem still flies on the grounds of the South Carolina State House, and there is a push underway in Mississippi to amend its Constitution to enshrine “Dixie” as the state song.
The new look at Sherman’s legacy, scholars of the Deep South readily acknowledge, challenges deeply held opinions of the general.
This is not just some arcane argument about ancient history. It is about a culture which has continued to have an impact on politics and social structure. After a fairly brief effort at reconstruction the North threw up its collective hands and decided to return control of the south to the white plutocrats so that they could get on with the industrial revolution. The Jim Crow regime that resulted perpetuated slavery in just about every way except a legal title of ownership. The new deal coalition depended on the votes of the solid south bloc in congress and did not dare do anything that would threaten their racist control.
It was not until the civil rights movement finally managed to gain national momentum in the 1960s that the legacy of the Confederacy had to deal with a serious challenge. The resulting civil rights acts and voting rights act dismantled the formal legal structures of Jim Crow, but they most certainly did not end racism. The events in Ferguson, MO are just one vivid reminder of how deeply it still permeates the fabric of American society.
Since the 60s we have certainly learned that the south doesn't have a monopoly on racism. However, the visible symbols of the southern historical fetishes disrupt the narrative that attempts to stifle efforts to explore the nature and ramifications of racism in 21st C America by claiming that we now live in a post racial society.