In the aftermath of the recent Charleston shooting, I have thought about Abram Smith’s time in South Carolina — he was posted to the Sea Islands as part of the U.S. Direct Tax Commission, living in Beaufort from 1862 until the spring of 1864 (he was dismissed from the position after heavy lobbying from his colleagues, William Henry Brisbane and William Wording, who couldn’t tolerate Smith’s views on pre-emption and believed he was an insufferable drunk). Smith always expressed the view that blacks and whites should be entitled to the same freedoms — a view that was simply too radical for most at the time.
(Incidentally, Smith was not the only northern radical to be appointed to a government post in the federally occupied South. For more on this, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, pages 149-150, and David H. Overy, Jr., “The Wisconsin Carpetbagger: A Group Portrait.” Wisconsin Magazine of History, Autumn, 1960.)
I can’t help but think Smith would have been appalled to know there was even any question about the presence of the Confederate flag (in any of its versions) flying anywhere in 2015.
More than 10 years ago, in 2004, the Ottawa Citizen‘s editor, Scott Anderson, sent me to cover the “last Confederate funeral” in Charleston (you can see more about that, and photos, here). I have posted the feature story I wrote at the time — in the context of the recent debate about the flag, it’s interesting to see how much, and how little, has changed in the last decade.
The closing quote, from Yale’s Dr. David Blight, seems especially prescient now.
The Ottawa Citizen
‘Moonlight, magnolias,’ and a myth that won’t die
Sat Apr 17 2004
Page: B1 / FRONT
Section: Saturday Observer
Byline: Ruth Dunley
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
Today the crew of the 19th-century submarine CSS H.L. Hunley will finally be laid to rest. The Southern passions and patriotism being fired by ‘the last Confederate funeral’ are proof, if there was any doubt, that for tens of thousands of Americans, their ‘Lost Cause’ — what one critic calls ‘one of the most god-awful causes’ that ever was — isn’t history. It’s still very much the present.
“There are few areas of the modern world that have bred a regional mythology so potent, so profuse and diverse, even so paradoxical, as the American South.”
–George B. Tindall, historian
Charleston, South Carolina — Today, 30,000 people will descend on this city to honour the memory of men who fought in a war that ended 139 years ago this month. They are here for what is being billed as “the last Confederate funeral.”
They will come from across the United States and overseas. Hundreds will pour themselves into corsets and sweat into grey woolen uniforms and carry Springfield rifles and sing hymns in churches while they pray for rebel souls.
They will march, 10,000 strong, in a funeral procession that stretches more than seven kilometres, to Magnolia Cemetery, land that was once a rice plantation on the banks of the Cooper River. There, rain or shine, the South will bury the crew of the CSS H.L. Hunley, a submarine that is, some say, to naval warfare what the Wright brothers’ first plane is to aviation history.
They will honour not just the men who died a horrific death at the bottom of the Atlantic, but also their beloved legacy of the Lost Cause. And they will do so with a patriotic passion that refuses to be silenced.
•
It was a bitterly cold night on Feb. 17, 1864, when the Hunley, on her final mission as the Confederates’ secret weapon in the U.S. Civil War, sank below the dark waves. The eight men who lowered themselves into the iron beast, which by this time had already been nicknamed “the peripatetic coffin” and “the murdering machine,” did so knowing that the two previous crews had not survived their missions.
But the Confederacy was desperate for a break in the war. General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard gave orders for the Hunley to be salvaged after its second failed test run and prepared for a strike against a Union naval blockade that was slowly choking the South. The sub was constructed from a cylindrical steam boiler and powered by a hand-cranked propeller. The air inside the vessel would have been stale, at best, as the sweat-soaked crew rotated the cranks at a feverish pace while the commander used candlelight to monitor the sub’s depth with a mercury gauge. Ballast tanks located at either end of the sub submerged the Hunley when they were filled and raised her when the crew emptied them by hand pump.
Despite being a marvel of 19th-century technology, the crew knew the odds were overwhelmingly against them. But their mission was successful — they torpedoed the Union warship Housatonic, becoming the first submarine to sink an enemy ship (a feat unmatched until the First World War).
Then, mysteriously, the Hunley vanished.
There are numerous theories about what sank her: damage sustained from the torpedo’s blast, a lack of oxygen, or some other mechanical malfunction. Her crew would have drowned in darkness, either pumping furiously as water seeped inside, or simply passing out, one by one, at their handcranks, without the energy to propel the sub to the surface.
Calls for the recovery of the Hunley were heard long after the war’s end. At one point, P.T. Barnum is said to have offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could find the lost sub. Divers searched around the site of the Housatonic to no avail for more than a century.
Then, in 1995, a team formed by author Clive Cussler found the Hunley underneath layers of sand and silt. The sub was raised in 2000 and taken to a conservation lab in North Charleston.
But the story of the Hunley is not just one of oceanographic technology or the wonders of modern science. More than that is the fact that eight faceless and, in some cases, nameless, men who fought for the Confederacy can command the attention of tens of thousands of people. What is it about the Hunley and her crew that have made them Confederate superstars?
The answer lies in the mythology of the South, and memory of war.
•
It is impossible to drive through any of the former Confederate states without seeing red, white and blue battle flags flying from private homes. It is a symbol that is simultaneously loved and loathed by those who live south of the Potomac. Every summer is filled with Confederate reenactments. Confederate memorials can be found in almost every courthouse square.
“Confederate heritage is big politics,” says David Blight, a professor at Yale who specializes in Civil War history. “The Confederate flag has made and unmade a couple of governors of South Carolina, as hard as it is to believe. It matters to people.”
In fact, 14 Southern governors were invited to this weekend’s funeral, but none will attend. Most have declared they can’t fit the event into their schedules, but it’s just as likely they were wary of attending an event that is so loaded with Confederate imagery.
Mr. Blight, a winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy for his book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, says the politics of the South are very much a part of today’s funeral.
“For all those who have embraced this story of the Hunley and will march in the the funeral parade to bury the remains and so on, they’re honouring Confederate dead. They’re honouring men who served the Confederate cause,” he says. “And maybe many of them are only doing it because they think the remains of any Civil War soldier found anywhere ought to have a proper burial, and I couldn’t agree more. But I suspect there’s more going on than that.”
Mr. Blight says some people who are taking part in the Hunley funeral are simply part of a wider group in search of answers about their past. But for others, honouring Confederate dead has much to do with seeking answers about the present. It is those people, he says, who have become “very political in the service of trying to create a story about the Confederacy as a noble, maybe divinely inspired, effort to preserve certain values.”
For them, the Hunley funeral represents a chance to champion those values and stems from a deep desire to “believe that what the Confederacy stood for was the best cause, even if it was lost.”
“Let’s face it,” he says. “The civil rights revolution of the ’50s and ’60s really transformed America … And for a lot of white Americans, particularly white Southerners, who never really believed in these changes and never really wanted these changes, one of the ways they’ve been able to express that is through their neo-Confederate heritage.”
But for many, the paradox of Southern mythology is a fine line between heritage and hatred. In recent years debates have raged from the PTA level all the way up to the Supreme Court. Dozens of Southern teenagers have been sent home from school for wearing Confederate flag T-shirts, and a number of Southern states have fought long and bitter battles about the flag. (In South Carolina, the flag was removed from the Statehouse dome in July 2000 after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People initiated an economic boycott, urging tourists to spend their money elsewhere. The boycott, which cost the state an estimated $20 million, still stands because the flag was moved from the dome to a new location on the Statehouse grounds.) Two years ago, a federal appeals court ruled that Virginia must allow a Confederate heritage group to display its flag logo on specialty state licence plates.
“Why doesn’t it just go away?” asks Mr. Blight. “Why doesn’t the Confederate flag just go away? I mean, it’s 140-some-odd years old, it’s just a relic. Well, it’s because it has so many current uses over time.”
David Goldfield, another Southern historian, agrees the Hunley funeral speaks volumes about Southern mythology and how that fits in with current politics in the United States. George Orwell, he says, offers the best explanation: He who controls the past commands the future, and he who commands the future conquers the past.
“This is a contest not merely about historical interpretation,” says Mr. Goldfield, who is the author of Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History. “This is a contest and a conflict over what the future of this region is going to look like, and what we’re going to remember, and how we’re going to remember it — so the stakes are pretty high.”
Mr. Goldfield, who teaches history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, says the crew members of the Hunley are being used to put a positive spin on the ideology of the Confederacy.
“These commemorations are much more about the living and the present than they are about the dead and the past,” he says. “They are being used to legitimize the Confederate cause, and therefore legitimize the people who honour that cause today.”
He agrees with Mr. Blight that part of the Confederate heritage movement stems from a segment of the population that did not support the advances of the civil rights era.
“I think we’re at a juncture of time now when many white southerners, in particular, feel under siege. They feel under siege by this strain of multiculturalism that is about in society, and they feel under siege by the fact that southern women are no longer necessarily the shy, retiring belles … and most of all, southern blacks are no longer in their place,” he says. “They’re now in government, they’re now in business and schools, universities, and this is disturbing (to some white Southerners) — because when you grow up with things being pretty stable and suddenly, in your lifetime, these major changes occur, it can be pretty disconcerting.”
Mr. Goldfield says this has led some Southerners to cling to the myth of the South, a myth many historians simply refer to as “moonlight and magnolias.”
“You can at least argue what’s happening here is that it’s merely a religious or a very solemn ritual to bury war dead — that it has nothing to do with slavery, nothing to do with race, and this is really the big bete noire of the Confederate cause,” he says. “The inescapable fact, and it’s just incontrovertible, is that the Confederacy existed and fought to preserve human bondage, and you can’t get away from that — but these commemorations and celebrations are used to detract, or at least distract attention, from that fact.”
When Mr. Blight was in Charleston only a few weeks ago, he spotted a bumper sticker that featured a black man in Confederate uniform. It read: “Honour and remember our black Confederate soldiers.”
“What’s going on with that?” he asks. “What’s going on there is complicated, but how best to legitimize the Confederacy in multicultural, multiracial America … than by advancing the idea that blacks supported it? It’s a ludicrous idea.”
Yet, Mr. Blight says he cannot give a public lecture any more without being asked about blacks who served in the Confederate military. While there were blacks who were part of Confederate regiments, they were never sent to the front. In fact, some of the men in those regiments were of mixed racial origins and likely would have owned slaves themselves. But these kinds of complexities, Mr. Blight argues, are lost in debates of public memory.
“The neo-Confederate movement has advanced a version of the Civil War that 40 or 50 years of scholarship and good historical writing has discredited,” he says. “But what that demonstrates is the distance between popular public memory and scholarly history is a great distance.”
The Hunley provides such groups with an icon to celebrate, an icon, Mr. Goldfield says, that is used to prop up the mythology and “underscore the Confederacy as a legitimate and heroic struggle where men fought and died for Southern independence, quite apart from slavery or human bondage or anything negative.”
Charleston’s Republican senator, Glenn McConnell, who is also chairman of the Hunley Commission, says the views of Mr. Blight and Mr. Goldfield are politically correct “nonsense.”
“A lot of the myth is in those people’s presumptions. This is no myth … the Hunley is real and the people on it are real. And it occurred. What these critics try to do is create the myth that the eight of them were turning that crank and everything going on out there because they wanted to be racist.”
Mr. McConnell, who has been a Civil War reenactor for 12 years (he plays roles on both sides), says the people who are taking part in today’s ceremonies “are saluting (the crew) for their bravery, their honour and their sacrifice, and there’s nothing shameful about having fought for the Confederacy.”
Moreover, Mr. McConnell says some people continue to knock the South to assuage their own discomfort with the past. Racism, he argues, was rampant on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
“The story of the Hunley and the makeup of its crew show that those are narrow-minded views of people who look down on Southerners generally in terms of our history … The point I’m making to you is, apparently some of these people attempt to get off their own guilt trip trying to blame the South for the ills in this country.”
Mr. Goldfield says that, as a Southerner himself, he certainly doesn’t look down on the region and firmly believes the funeral and other Confederate events have to do with “the loss of power of the white South.”
He argues that no one would want to dispute the courage of the Hunley crew — but says it’s still important to remember why they were fighting in the first place.
“(The crew) fought courageously, but it was one of the most god-awful causes of going to war that ever was, and that was human bondage,” he says. “History is one thing, but self-preservation is something else. This is not about history.”
Dale Roberts, a 72-year-old Confederate reenactor from Austin, Texas, says he is participating in the funeral procession today simply for of a love of history and a desire to connect with his past.
“I’ve always been a history buff. Most reenactors are amateur historians,” he says, listening as his granddaughters play Dixie and various other Southern songs on harps as people wait in line to see the Hunley.
“To attend the last Confederate funeral is quite an experience for me. I’ve been looking forward to it for some time.”
Today, Mr. Roberts, whose great-grandfather fought in the Confederate cavalry, will be in the procession with a Texas division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
“It’s a way to bring that history back to life. Being involved in this is a great honour,” he says. “There was a South and a Southern culture and a good part of that still remains. It’s very much a part of our history and our heritage. It sticks in my craw when I hear someone denigrate it or pass it off as a myth or something that didn’t exist. Because it did exist.”
•
Organizers are expecting about 300 reporters and photographers from most major American newspapers, including the Washington Post and USA Today, and CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS all plan to cover the funeral. For most, it is a quirky story of the South’s stubborn adherence to a past long-gone — a bizarre slice of Americana.
Still, Mr. Goldfield says it’s important not to write off people who take part in Confederate commemorations.
“You ought to take these folks seriously,” he says. “They’re not a fringe group dedicated to some quaint historical artifacts. They represent a much broader constituency in the South that feels, if not alienated, certainly ignored by the mainstream media and by interpretations of history that have compromised their own … This is just something that’s extremely important to them. It’s part of their identity, and they will fight to defend and protect it.”
James Cobb, a Southern historian at the University of Georgia, is currently writing From New South to No South: The Great Struggle Within Southern Identity. He has written widely about the interaction between economy, society and culture in the American South. He says Southerners tend to be criticized for their adherence to their past when, really, they’re not that different from other cultures.
“If you look around the world, as grudgeholders go, Southern whites are sort of just in their apprenticeship,” he says. “You could look anywhere in Europe and find examples of events of the past that live as though they happened yesterday, and these events would certainly antedate the Civil War in this country considerably.”
Mr. Cobb says some Southerners cling to their past in an effort to hold on to an identity that is different from the rest of the country.
“You can’t detach the Confederacy from the issue of slavery, and so it sort of seems as though these people, in doing this, are in some way refusing to admit that the South was on the wrong side in this one,” he explains. “But I think it just has to do with a way of sort of viewing the world and how one constructs an individual or group identity — and I think that’s what’s going on.
“And I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of people who do attach a racial and political agenda to these things … but I’m not quite ready to commit all these folks to the loony bin, as some people may be.”
In addition to wanting to preserve their own regional identity, Mr. Cobb says it’s
also important to remember that Southerners have always seen themselves as great patriots.
“The whole Southern rationale for seceding was not (that) they were abandoning their principles on which the nation was founded, but they were, in fact, trying to restore them. The country had gotten away from the ideals of individual states’ rights and sovereignty of the state, and had strayed from the fundamental principles on which the United States had been founded,” he says. “White Southerners have maintained throughout their history that they have been the most American of Americans, and so they’re just patriots on two levels, in the sense of a lot of them still being Confederate patriots as well as American patriots — and they don’t really see any contradiction at all.”
Southern writer Robert Penn Warren wrote at length about the many contradictions and fears of the South, and said that while Americans feel the Civil War, the do not face it.
“As long as we have a politics of race, we’re going to have a politics of the Civil War memory, and facing it will always be a problem as long as there is a community in America that insists on preserving, embracing and commemorating the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the whole cluster of meanings it has for people,” says Mr. Blight. “Only when the United States truly, truly ends up resolving our problems of racial inequality will we ever begin to put the Civil War completely to rest. And I don’t think we should hold our breath about that.”