Driving through Jonesboro recently, I noticed a sign directing one to the “Confederate Cemetery.” I wondered how long it will be until vandals will ride the current wave of popular sentiment to do their nasty work in that place, or in the Fayetteville City Cemetery on Ga. Highway 54, where Memorial Day services are held and where some headstones bear the crossed stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag, or in Tyrone in the small, crowded cemetery adjacent to Town Hall on Senoia Road where you can see small Confederate flags (egad!) recently stuck in the ground at the graves of Confederate soldiers by Sons of Confederate Veterans.
With one foot on either side of the Civil War by my Northern-born parents and my Southern upbringing, I have to take ownership of my attitudes, and I confess thinking years ago when Georgia had a raging controversy about the state flag that the Confederate battle flag should come down from government displays for one simple reason: too many fellow citizens see it as a symbol that excludes them.
That is enough to render that flag to an historical relic, but there it should be allowed to be displayed with Southern pride, not in shameful disgrace like the Nazi swastika.
Perhaps that Southern pride is not known or appreciated by all, certainly not by the media on the hunt to magnify every angry claim of white racism, whether real, imagined or invented.
Maybe a few media types would benefit from studying the treatment of Southerners in the aftermath of the Union victory in 1865 when carpetbaggers from the North swept in to take control. In reaction to the stereotypical ridicule of their people as backward, ignorant, inbred hicks, is it any wonder that decades after the war Southerners favored a flag that reminded them proudly of their heritage?
Yes, take the flag down since some see it as a racist symbol. I know the Charleston murderer was white, from the South and a racist, but that doesn’t make white Southerners racist. Be careful of the racism recklessly projected into the hearts of others, for it may not be there and your reaction to that imagined slight could be carried to a damaging extreme.
Activist voices are now gathering strength from the successful clamor to remove old flags and just beginning to denounce memorials depicting Confederate figures and even streets and buildings bearing the names of heroes of the Confederacy. Would they stop before revising schoolbooks?
We should be wary of those trying to purge the warts and wrinkles from our history, which is full of inconvenient paradoxes, hypocrisy and many violations of modern ideals. To comb through history and judge by current standards is a fool’s errand.
I am not excusing slavery. My guess is all but the dimwitted in America knew instinctively slavery was wrong, but people can rationalize nearly anything that is in their economic self-interest, especially when it has been handed down by generations before them and any one person had little chance of changing the system.
Even so, most Southerners did not fight for the Confederacy to protect slavery. Wealthy plantation owners owned slaves while the common man did not, but every Southerner deeply resented outsiders invading their territory and inflicting their will by force. As much as Northerners cannot understand it, Southern farm boys fought fiercely and died for the cause they thought of as their country’s freedom.
One Confederate name ubiquitous throughout the South is Robert E. Lee. Small minds that seek to vilify Lee are either ignorant of history or don’t know the meaning of honor. He was such an accomplished and respected soldier at the beginning of the Civil War that he was offered the rank of major general and command of forces defending Washington, D.C.
He said to Presidential Advisor Francis Blair, “Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”
When Virginia seceded shortly thereafter, Lee took a very difficult decision, especially since his family was divided on the issue of secession, resigned his commission in the Union Army and took leadership of northern Virginia forces.
During the course of the war Robert E. Lee earned respect on both sides for his wisdom, style and leadership. When he blundered, as he did when he ordered Pickett’s Charge, he confessed to his men the losses were his fault alone.
At the Battle of Appomattox Court House in April of 1865, with his army surrounded, Lee listened to his men imploring him to melt into the mountains and continue the fight as a guerrilla force, but he chose surrender as the proper course.
The next day he addressed his troops and told them, “… So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South.” Whatever his personal desires, Lee had done his duty.
Contrast Lee’s honorable conduct with William Sherman’s march through Georgia, burning farms, plantations, towns and cities, encouraging his troops to steal what they could, inflicting untold death, destruction and misery on the civilian population. But his side won the war and wrote the history making him a Union hero.
While you might call the North’s cause pure and the South’s evil, I wonder how you would explain the fact that slaves were held in the North as well? Confederate General Lee set free in 1862 the slaves he had inherited, while he was beginning the fight against the North. Union Generals Sherman and Grant did not set their slaves free until compelled to do so by law in 1865.
President Lincoln himself was not an anti-slavery activist. He wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that …”
Early in the war Lincoln conceived of the Emancipation Proclamation, not as a humanitarian gesture to set slaves free as popularly believed, but as a tool of war to inflict chaos on the South. Even when the document was finalized in the summer of 1862, Lincoln held it, waiting for a Union victory to give weight to his announcement.
Week after frustrating week he waited until finally in September Union forces prevailed at the Battle of Antietam. Lincoln announced the proclamation that would become effective when he signed it on Jan. 1 the following year, giving Confederate states the time to rejoin the Union, in which case he would discard the Proclamation and let them keep their slaves.
The Confederate states did not rise to the incentive offered and the Emancipation Proclamation did go into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, declaring the legal freedom of slaves held in the 10 states still in rebellion.
But there were about a million other slaves in the U.S. that were not affected at all, including those held by Generals Sherman and Grant and others in the North. And of course the Southern slaves had to escape their owners and make their way to the North to realize their freedom. Was Lincoln really the great Emancipator he is made to be?
Those who hold on to their reverence of Lincoln for freeing the slaves might consider another wrinkle. In 1862 Lincoln acted on his belief that integrating freed blacks into American society would be sufficiently troublesome that they should be shipped out of the country.
With Congressional funding of $600,000 Lincoln established the Bureau of Immigration and appointed the Reverend James Mitchell to run it. Mitchell and Lincoln pursued possibilities in present-day Belize, Guyana, Panama, British Honduras and Isle a Vache just off Haiti, where several hundred freed slaves were settled in 1862, but the attempt failed within a year. This attempt to export former slaves expired when Lincoln was assassinated.
One more dose of reality on Abraham Lincoln. When he delivered his masterful words known as the Gettysburg Address, he was dedicating a graveyard for the brave men who died on that battlefield. But too many Americans don’t realize his words and the cemetery were for the Union soldiers, not the Confederate soldiers who also died in those fields nearby.
The huge gathered crowd had to deal with the stench of death, mostly from Confederate corpses still rotting in the sun or shoved into shallow mass graves. Who could blame the Union graves workers for favoring their own or the locals who saw the Confederates as invaders?
Nine years later, a Richmond, Virginia group had finally raised the money to fund a body recovery expedition and they returned from the fields of Gettysburg over 3,000 dead Confederate sons to be buried with honors in the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.
I know I have given the false impression here that I am not a fan of Abraham Lincoln, but I definitely am. He was a great man who walked tall, and not by his height. But like all great men — like Martin Luther King — Lincoln had an imperfect record that does not negate what he accomplished.
We should be careful of the tendency to deify some historical figures and condemn others, for most of them are a mix of virtues and stumbles.
Yes, remove the Confederate battle flag from government displays. But be careful applying today’s standards to events of the past.
Trying to purge every reminder of the Confederacy, as if it didn’t happen, is a dangerous game that is not only misguided, it will further divide us and breed conflict for a very long time.
[Terry Garlock of Peachtree City occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen. His email is terry@garlock1.com.]
