Unionist and Southern
Living the Problem of History
I debated writing on this topic at all. There’s not much of an upside to writing about the legacy of the American Civil War, and enormous potential for misstatement, misunderstanding, offense, and error. When I first thought about writing on this topic, I figured I would try and present some interesting statistics on how Americans identify by ancestry and origins, and point out the unusual trend of Americans claiming, for example, “Georgian” or “Kentuckian” as an ancestry (rather than, say, English or Armenian). More broadly, the share of the American population that claims just “American” ancestry has been stable at between 5.5 and 6.5 percent of the population for the last decade, though this varies from a low of 1.3% in Hawaii to 21.2% in Kentucky, as of 2013.
But as I began planning the post, and as I watched the national dialogue about the Confederate legacy unfold, I couldn’t help but feel that there was no part of the public debate with which I could identify. Treebeard’s, “I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side” line comes to mind. Here, I want to explain what I think it means to be unionist and southern.
Unionist and Southern
What Are We Talking About?
A bit about me: some of you arriving at this post will be surprised by the content. I usually write about migration and related demographic, economic, or policy trends. And there are some fascinating such trends related to the Civil War and its legacy, especially in the south and for African-American migration. But for today, I’m taking a step away from my usual fare.
I consider myself a southerner. I was born and raised in Kentucky, which most southerners agree is a southern state. Within Kentucky, I grew up in the Bluegrass, a region famous for its horses, bourbon, and tobacco, as well as fanatical devotion to UK basketball. Rural-centric culture and extraordinary sports obsession? Sounds like the south. Indeed, the Bluegrass region was the longest-settled part of Kentucky, and had numerous plantations that could as easily have been in Virginia or Georgia as Kentucky (except they didn’t grow cotton for climatic reasons).
This isn’t a story about Kentucky, however, but about the south: and particularly the white south. I’m white, and the folks making big public claims about “southern heritage” are also usually white. Obviously, non-white residents of southern states, be they of African, Native American, Asian, Hispanic, or any other descent have their own view of what constitutes southern heritage. And an African-American person’s view of the Confederacy will certainly be informed by experiences that I can’t share. I would not for a second seek to exclude other visions of the south and southern identity, but here I am speaking to white southern identity because (1) That’s what I know, (2) That’s what’s being contested in the news, (3) That’s where the big moral question is. Nobody in their right mind argues (anymore) that slavery was the fault of the slaves. At least, I hope not.
Beyond white southerners, I should make clear my primary audience is to the group of white southern residents who call themselves southerners and value a sense of connectedness to a shared southern past. Many white residents of southern states are descended from confederates, but that past means nothing to them. Many other white residents of southern states are migrants with no tie to the confederate past. I have some things I hope these people will hear, but I am primarily talking about my own people: those for whom “southerner” is a claim to a sense of shared community, history, culture, and, very nearly, nationhood.
Finally, I would like to mention that I’m well aware of the remarkable nexus of privilege I enjoy. I know very well how a confluence of social structures have given me advantages based on my race, sex, class, etc, and enabled me to arrive at the conclusions I reach. I also know that many issues that seem small to me may loom large to others, and many issues I focus on as pressing and important may seem, to others, to be silly pre-occupations of a privileged group. That may be. I can only suggest that these are issues that matter for a relatively large group of people, and, as a nation, we are probably better off not systematically ignoring any large group’s concerns.
Unionist and Southern
Piles of Bodies at Gettysburg
For those that know me personally, you know where I stand on the Rebel Flag question. I’ll put here (for those that don’t know me) what I said on my Facebook when this issue began to be debated again:
“I can’t comment on the racial connotations of the flag because I’ve never really had any experience with that and because the flag has so many other historical meanings for me.
First and foremost, the flag is about culture. About a culture that decided its choice to abuse and trade humans endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights was more important than upholding and defending the United States Constitution many of them swore to protect. The flag represents a historical tradition of disregarding good political order and engaging in violent upheavals against stable and organized society. And beyond that, it also signifies a heritage of opposition to the duly constituted government of these United States, founded in a base willingness to become oath-breakers and enemies of the world’s greatest experiment in self-government. Indeed, the flag embodies an ancient opposition to self-government.
So, yeah, the flag is about culture, and tradition, and heritage. Except, even when you remove the massively important race thing, it turns out the rebel flag is really just a symbol of, well, rebellion. Maybe for some people that’s a glamorous word. But for most of us it’s piles of bodies at Gettysburg.”
I stand by that now. To make it more clear: I firmly identify as a southerner, and yet I think the “Lost Cause” was plainly and simply evil. It was hostile to virtually every kind of moral framework I can imagine calling good.
And Yet I Am a Southerner.
Above, I distinguished between residents of southern states, and southerners. I said southerners are those that see other southerners as part of a shared community. For the political philosophers out there, this description will be familiar: I am identifying Southerners as an ethnic or national group. We have fairly consistent standards for who else is a southerner, and the rest of the world fairly consistently identifies us as such, and this identity comes equipped with traditions, practices, preferences, and politics.
Being a southerner, then, can mean many things. Various pieces of social and cultural identities may serve to mark someone as a southerner: an accent, an attitude towards agriculture, ownership of firearms, a preference for small-towns, a hesitancy towards industrialism, seersucker, iced sweet tea, the pronunciation of “New Orleans,” a certain set of strict manners, bow-ties, effusive hospitality, never saying what you really mean in order to avoid conflict, ‘taking life at a slower pace,’ or other common identifiers of the south. There is no end of writing about what it means to be Southern: because southerners recognize that identification as southern is meaningful, and that, for southerners, anything that is called “southern” can make a claim to authenticity and moral standing that anything “northern” or “Yankee” can’t. Debates about how to define particular nationalisms are so famous that there’s actually a classic logical fallacy named for it: the No True Scotsman fallacy. But although we may disagree on what exactly defines a person as southern, all southerners agree that there is some kind of definition, and that things that are southern (and the moral status of those things) is somehow linked to our own goodness and worth.
Unionist and Southern
A Southern Nation-State
Throughout modern, western history at least, most nations have wanted their own political organization and self-government: a state. Not a U.S. state, but a sovereign entity to protect the homeland and ensure some vision of civil order and justice for its citizens, presumed to be of a certain nation. However briefly, the American South did get to have a state. The Confederate States of America was a nation-state in a way that the United States of America sometimes struggles to achieve. While in the USA we recognize we are extremely diverse and divided, and view that pluralism as a kind of strength, the CSA was a nation-state more in the way that a European country is a nation-state. The imagined community of the south was bound together with near-perfect alignment between perceived cultural or national borders, and political borders (with the exception of West Virginia and so-called “Border States” like Kentucky).
The Southern Nation-State was indisputably and inextricably tied to, and dependent upon, the institution of slavery, and was as such morally crippled from the start. The Southern sense of itself as a nation and as a people rested upon the subjugation of black slaves. Repeatedly, southern writers noted how the “equality” of the white race rested on the foundation of slavery. They pointed out perceived inequality and division in the north as proof that a “Free Society” could not be harmonious, that is, could not truly be a nation, in the sense of a cohesive, morally meaningful body of shared community and imagination.
The Southern State was defeated and destroyed, but its very breaking created a new mythos for the southern nation. Reconstruction, the “Lost Cause,” a nearly century-long campaign of terror against freed blacks, and continuing shared cultural, social, economic, climatic, linguistic, and political ties served to preserve and extend the Southern Nation.
Unionist and Southern
The Last Sub-Nation Standing
The 20th Century served well to create the kind of nationwide American culture southerners had once believed to be impossible. The widely shared experiences of the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression, as well as the Cold War, were major factors in creating such a shared identity. Furthermore, extremely high rates of migration broke up some of the momentum in intergenerational passage of virtually all American subcultures, including southern national identity. This effect was complemented by rising youth culture and nationally shared media like television.
Although perhaps fewer people identify as southerners today than in the past, the identity still remains for many. It is also one of fairly few American regional identities to persist through the 20th century. Yankeedom as a cultural force is, I think, far less prevalent than Southern culture. The Mountain West has a distinct culture, but Southern and Western cultures have borrowed heavily from one another, and are now so closely aligned in many cases as to be indistinguishable, becoming a kind of “Americana” culture. Other region identities exist, but, especially with high internal migration and rising immigration, old forms of identity are rapidly changing, vanishing, or being integrated with new forms of identity.
Thus, where once many segments of the United States identified with their region in a way somewhat akin to the American South (recall southerners were not the first group to consider secession), now southerners are increasingly alone in their inherited regional identity. We stick out. And worse, we don’t just love our homeland (i.e. the South), but our homeland once rebelled for atrocious reasons.
Unionist and Southern
History Means the War
For Southerners, American history revolves around the Civil War (or any of its other names it goes by in the South). Dealing with that central event (and the attendant question of slavery) is the core moral and psychological task facing the southerner who thinks seriously about their identity.
Yet unlike our forebears in 1861, we are no longer regionalists in a young nation of untested solidity. We are regionalists in the most powerful country on earth. We have been bonded to the rest of the nation by world wars and recessions, migration and media, and so southerners are well-and-truly “American.” I mentioned before that many people in the US claim “American” as an ancestry: the vast majority of those people live in the mid-south. The only two other US-based non-Native American ancestries to get sufficient numbers to show up in the Census Bureau’s summary statistics are Cajuns and Texans: subsets of “Southern” identity.
For a Southerner who loves the United States, who admires our country’s centuries-long experiment in self-government and individual liberty, who values the constitution and national loyalty, then, this question of the Civil War is tricky. All my patriotism as an American (and explicit, outward-facing patriotism seems, anecdotally, more common in the south), tell me that the Union was right. And all my moral sensibilities, no few of them inculcated through that old time religion of which we southerners are so fond, tell me that the Union was right.
But genetically, I’m half confederate. For those of us with cultural identities that are inextricably tied to still-debated moments in history (be it Southerners, or Israelis, or Kurds, or any other similar group), figuring out what to do about our past is not as easy as it may look for those on the outside. For us, lightly and easily scouring the landscape clean of all evidence of the past is not so simple. And for the whole nation, it may not be desirable.
Unionist and Southern
Judging History
Engage in a thought experiment with me. Consider, for a moment, that you are a parent, and you raise your child as best you can. Then, when your child is of age, he or she leaves home. You love your child, and keep in touch. One day, a police officers comes to your door with a subpoena: you will be called as a witness in a court case. Specifically, your beloved child is accused of being an axe-murderer.
You familiarize yourself with the case. You discover that it’s not just an allegation; there’s video evidence and witnesses and everything. Your child is an axe-murderer, a savage killer, nothing like what you raised them to be, nothing like what you hoped they would be, nothing like they were when you knew them.
When you arrive at court, you must give a deposition. What do you say?
Do you simply reiterate all the terrible things everyone agrees your child has done, but of which you have no first-hand knowledge? Do you make no statement? Do you try and justify your child, save them at any cost? Do you beg the families of the victims for forgiveness, beyond reason or excuse? On this point, it’s hard to make too extreme a judgment of the parent, regardless of their chosen response.
The position of a southerner today, who loves and values the union, is not so terribly different. For us, the south has not been whips and slavery. We never knew that south. When we talk about the south, that world is inconceivable for most of us. When we discuss the confederacy, what, then, should we say? Should we simply regurgitate what is already widely known? Should there be an annual reading of the south’s sins, that all the descendants of confederate soldiers can show appropriate public dismay? Should we try and provide a counter-narrative, explaining that the south isn’t really that bad, that actually the war was for this reason or that, or that our ancestors weren’t really that bad?
I think there’s more-or-less a right answer to these questions, but at this exact moment, my point is much simpler: there’s a whole range of possible responses that are comprehensible without prejudice towards the respondent. I am suggesting that, for so many Americans, “There but for the grace of God go you.”
Unionist and Southern
Telling the Truth
I have been circuitous throughout this post because I want to lay all the groundwork I can before getting to the hard parts. I have argued that southerners are part of a kind of “nation,” separate from the rest of the US. I have argued that this nation once had a de facto state governing it (not a constitutionally legitimate one, of course). That state was immoral, not because it was a nation-state, but because (1) it was founded on an inhuman principle of racial supremacy and (2) the process of its founding was not constitutionally legitimate. Whatever the case, this state, and its violent demise, left a legacy that in fact solidified national identity, yet did so around a core alternately empty or evil. At the core of this southern identity seems to be either slavery or emptiness. Yet even so, millions of people identify as southerners and, on one level or another, they have to face the problem of history.
Of the many understandable responses to this problem, in my opinion the best is to leave the problem unresolved. Let the problem be problematic. For those of us who are unionist and southern, we should adamantly assert that the union was worth preserving at enormous cost of blood, and that slavery was worth abolishing at almost any cost of blood; yet also that for us the south has been wonderful, and that we love in all its dirt and glory. For us the confederate dead are both villains and heroes. The south’s story is almost Greek in its inevitable tragedy.
Unionist and Southern
Atlanta to Savannah
I think the quintessential moment of the Civil War for this problem is William Tecumseh Sherman’s Burning of Atlanta. Not the way “Gone With the Wind” has memorialized it (burning as confederate soldiers retreat), the city was in fact burned at first methodically, but Sherman’s inability to control his soldiers (and perhaps tacit approval of their arson) led to a more general blaze.
What shall we make of this, and then Sherman’s whole March to the Sea? Undoubtedly it broke the southern will to fight. And up to that point, Sherman’s brutality in Tennessee and north Georgia had effectively served to advance the cause of the union where more conventional tactics might not have succeeded. Sure, it was a crime of war: but what should one make of slave-holders?
For many a sublime Yankee, the answer is easy. Like Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness,” the attitude towards confederates is simple: to righteously (with so little self knowledge) proclaim, “Exterminate the brutes!” Railroad ties around trees, farms ablaze, cities laid waste, and the region will not rise against the union for generations to come, if only the violence is sufficient. For some, this is enough, and it is celebrated. Sherman’s March to the Sea is a a great Union victory, and his “Christmas gift” to Lincoln of Savannah, GA is much memorialized and cheered. Yay Union.
Of course, we can also note that from Atlanta to Savannah, Sherman pioneered a campaign of pure terror. His victims were our ancestors. What should we make of this? Should we unionist southerners celebrate Sherman and dance in the ashes of our ancestors’ homes, reassuring ourselves that they were bad people, and we are so much better? Or should we make an exception to our union sympathies, and say that this time, this one time, the south was in the right?
I think neither. I think the question should be left unsettled, so that we may be unsettled by it. History is not so simple. I think a union southerner is simply bound by two competing histories, not free to wholeheartedly endorse either one or the other.
So what does this perspective look like when we get down to brass tacks and try to address today’s pressing questions?
Unionist and Southern
A Question About a Flag
The rebel flag should not be flown in an official capacity. I would not even fly it in a private or personal capacity. But I worry that at the present moment, American political discourse about confederate symbols risks gravely misreading how history and culture work.
For example, in my home state of Kentucky, there is a statue of Jefferson Davis in the capitol. He was born in Kentucky, so is therefore one of our significant historical figures. There is now a proposal, backed by none other than Senator Mitch McConnell, to remove the statue.
That makes sense: Davis was the foremost of the traitors to the republic, and a virulent racist, whose racism was defining for his whole career. But then again, simply removing the statue doesn’t do much good. It won’t actually improve the way the state views and symbolizes the experience of the civil war. It won’t change the fact that we resisted ratifying the reconstruction amendments until the 1970s. Simply removing confederate symbols will just leave a cultural empty space, perhaps momentarily burned clear, but the weeds will choke out the light soon enough. Without a powerful counter-narrative of the civil war, the mere removal of confederate symbols will prove futile.
A better, if much harder, solution, I think, would be to keep Jefferson Davis’ statue in the capitol, and simply declare open season for vandalism. Or, if that is too chaotic, replace whatever inscription now exists with an inscription noting how he and others like him brought about one of the worst calamities in our nation’s history through their devotion to an evil institution. Such a document, however, would require public leaders to adopt a coherent moral voice.
More broadly, I wonder about rebel flags flown as memorials to the confederate war dead. I am unsure if they really should be removed. Certainly rebel flags flown at state capitols are offensive and represent wholly terrible things, but maybe a better solution would be to keep the flag, keep the monument, and replace all the inscriptions with panels explaining that the confederate dead, however brave and valiant, fought and died for an evil cause, sold to them by merchants of darkness, and ending in futility and meaninglessness.
Are we really better off erasing confederate history? I think not. I think we might be better off with a concerted effort towards public learning.
The desire to clean up history doesn’t stop with official monuments. Historical games that educate people about the Civil War have been stripped from the Apple AppStore. CNN has seriously asked whether the Jefferson Memorial should be altered, due to his ownership of slaves. These measures won’t help us deal with history. Instead, when a topic like slavery or the civil war is pushed out of public view, extremists and radicals are able to claim ownership of it. The tragedy, then, is not that the “Lost Cause” narrative has survived to the present day, but rather that the Union cause is no longer proclaimed.
PS- The TL;DR version of this article would be, “Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. We should make sure he would still want to be.”
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
