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Tricky DixieThe mainstreaming of the Confederate ideology.

By David Greenberg
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET
Confederate flag

As much as we want to believe that the moral questions about the Civil War were settled long ago, the Confederacy's legacy remains contested ground—as the 2000 campaign reminded us. Last March, George W. Bush and John McCain both shrank from calling for the Confederate flag's retirement during the South Carolina primary for fear of offending GOP voters. And in November, the nation's electoral map showed us to be as divided along North-South lines as at any time since the Civil War.

Now Bush has populated his administration with proponents of decidedly Southern values—fundamentalist Christianity, states' rights ideology, conservative views on race—and two of his Cabinet nominees, aspiring Attorney General John Ashcroft and would-be Interior Secretary Gale Norton, have expressed a measure of sympathy for the ideals of the Old South. How did defending Dixie suddenly become fashionable? Is this the onset of reactionary chic?

Romantic views of the Confederacy have a long history. After their defeat in the Civil War, white Southerners faced bleak prospects: They were devastated economically, stripped of their pride, and forced to accept leadership from Northerners and even African-Americans. Naturally, many looked to extract dignity from their loss. "They nurtured a public memory of the Confederacy," historian Gary Gallagher has written, through holidays, monuments, veterans' reunions, and other rituals. Artists and writers celebrated the goals for which Southerners fought, and extolled the rebels' bravery. They founded groups devoted to cavalier heritage, such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The "Lost Cause" was born.

For a time, Lost Cause advocates secured their rose-colored interpretations of slavery (a benign, paternalistic institution) and their dim view of Reconstruction (the exploitation of Dixie by predatory carpetbaggers) in American history books. The vanquished Robert E. Lee became canonized as a great general, while the man who bested him, Ulysses S. Grant, drew scorn as a plodding butcher. The Civil War was rewritten not as a fight over the expansion of slavery into the West (as most historians view it again today) but as a tug of war over the principle of states' rights or, in some versions, over federal tariffs. Popular culture too—notably the films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939)—etched Lost Cause history into many minds.

But much as Confederate sympathizers downplayed the role of racial strife in Southern history, it could not be kept off center stage. After all, if you believed the war was about a clash of cultures, or of economic systems, you still had to note the key difference between those systems—slavery. And if you argued that the war was about states' rights, you still had to identify those rights the Confederates were defending—the right to enslave African-Americans. The notion that one could separate the goals of states' rights and of racial equality might make sense in the abstract (as Gale Norton apparently was trying to say), but in practice and in history it has had no real meaning. The position of blacks remained, as the political scientist V.O. Key noted, the South's overriding issue.

Robert E. Lee

With the rise of racial liberalism in the mid-20th century, historians revised their assessments of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and support for the Lost Cause mythology waned. But, paradoxically, the advance of civil rights also contributed to the revival of symbols and language of the Confederacy, as white Southerners saw their system of legalized segregation endangered. During Strom Thurmond's 1948 campaign for the presidency, his Dixiecrat supporters brandished Confederate flags and photos of Robert E. Lee. Within a couple of years, the rebel banner became, in one historian's words, "a nationwide fad, foreshadowing coonskin caps and hula hoops."

The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down segregated schools, fueled the backlash. Confederate lore and imagery accompanied a widespread Southern campaign of "massive resistance" to federal desegregation orders. Dozens of U.S. congressmen signed the "Southern Manifesto" pledging to fight federal intervention, and federal troops and Southern whites faced off at schools in Little Rock in 1957, Montgomery in 1961, and the University of Mississippi in 1962. The star-studded X of the Confederate battle flag began appearing on redesigned Southern state banners, and demonstrators waved the Dixie standard at anti-integration protests.

In response to civil rights advances, new Southern heritage groups also sprang up, devoted to such efforts as schooling children in their own version of Civil War history. One 1954 "catechism" discovered by author Tony Horwitz taught kids that slaves "were always ready and willing to serve" their masters and that the "War Between the States" was caused by "the disregard by those in power for the rights of Southern states." That language was telling: for although many Southern whites openly espoused white supremacism, they nonetheless insisted—again like their Lost Cause predecessors—that they were really championing the cause of states' rights. The new Southern resistance was most famously epitomized by Alabama Gov. George Wallace, whose defiant defense of segregation shocked liberals but found unexpected legions of followers in Maryland, Wisconsin, and elsewhere outside Dixie.

Wallace's popularity highlighted an unusual divergence in American values in the '60s. On the one hand, the civil rights movement succeeded smashingly—not just in dismantling segregation but also in making the belief in equal rights and the tolerance of differences a broadly accepted national creed. Racism had been routed, discredited. Yet at the same time, as Wallace realized, resentment toward Washington and the welfare state was burgeoning around America, and the ancient call of "states' rights" now resonated with those whose complaints had little to do with forced desegregation. In particular, Westerners such as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan realized they could tap into the anti-Washington ardor of the once solidly Democratic South to build a new Republican coalition. Goldwater's inroads in the South came at the expense of his popularity elsewhere (his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, hurt him), but Nixon and Reagan—and later Bush père and fils—brought the South decisively into the GOP tent.

The simultaneous, rival triumphs of civil rights and states' rights sparked new political battles in the late-20th-century South. Groups like the NAACP now felt emboldened to challenge state governments that continued to wave the Confederate flag, build monuments, or devote holidays to rebel leaders. As they saw it, they now had the power and the moral high ground to demand the elimination of these badges of slavery and Jim Crow. But the new round of activism also provoked a new neo-Confederate backlash, as whites organized to oppose reparations for slavery or the removal of flags, as well as policies such as affirmative action and busing.

Although this latest neo-Confederate revival had its share of white supremacist groups, overtly bigoted appeals were largely jettisoned. The once proudly racist White Citizens Councils reinvented themselves as Conservative Citizens Councils and espoused mainstream Republican philosophy alongside their Southern heritage activities. The new tack, moreover, went so far as to appropriate the now-dominant liberal principles and language. Just like other ethnic groups, the new neo-Confederates claimed, they too deserved to celebrate their heritage and honor their ancestors. A spokesman for the Heritage Preservation Association has claimed, "We're chosen people, surviving many atrocities"—sounding (in Tony Horwitz's comparison) like an Anti-Defamation League representative. The HPA also borrowed a page from the NAACP, establishing a legal defense fund to help people such as a worker who lost his job after pasting a battle flag to his toolbox. This line of argument even cropped up among John Ashcroft's defenders: They said he was being attacked for his religion—throwing down the victimization card as surely as any left-wing multiculturalist.

The South has become the most critical part of the Republican Party's base. No Southern state voted for Gore, unless you count Florida. It got that way because, for the last few decades, it responded most avidly to the Republicans' anti-Washington messages. And now that it has done so, it dictates not only the leadership of the party, from Tom DeLay and Trent Lott to George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, but also its message. Is it any wonder that the message contains a dose of affection for the Lost Cause?

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David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out: Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge.
Photographs of: Confederate flag © Paul A. Souders/Corbis; Robert E. Lee from Corbis. All rights reserved.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: There is news of the Brazilian descendants of Confederates here: apparently Brazil offered cheap land to them in 1865. A claim that Native Americans would have done better under the Confederacy here. An argument about the number of slaves and slave-owners brought this set of figures from the reliable Munguza. And a stellar thread--literally, three star posters doing battle--on the real issues of the War starts here, with History Guy concluding "No-one seriously believes today that states have the right to secede. They were not fighting over the now-current states' rights issues such as pollution control and minimum wage laws, which did not exist then. The Union won the battle it was fighting and we are all better off for that."]


Why do so many Americans self-identify with the Confederacy? (I accept that the explanation is not a deep-seated desire to own their fellow human beings). The Confederacy was a nation of sorts for four years, over 100 years ago. Ancestors of living Ameircans who lived or fought there, were also citizens of the Union both before and after the war. It makes as much sense to identify with the Unionists they had once been and later as to identify with the Confederates.

Lots of Americans have roots on the losing side of one historical movement or another, but don't preserve an identity associated with a lost cause (especially one so closely connected to a great evil). Children of Italian, German, or Japanese immigrants don't typically identify with fascism, which is as much a lost cause as the Confederacy. I've never heard of a British-descended American identifying with the red coats, or with the pillagers of Washington in 1812.

--History Guy

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No doubt about it--looked at from a Confederate perspective the cause of the war was slavery. The "Peculiar Institution" was the only gut-wrenching issue motivating the South. Taxes, tariffs, internal improvements, agrarian vs. industrial interests, roundhead vs cavalier culture, all lacked the punch to loose large-scale murder among out great-great-grandfolks. Only the threat of the long-term elimination of the practice through restriction of slave territory by a beneficent nature--19th century agriculture came to a screeching halt at the 98th meridian--and a divided Congress could have fueled the Southern Conspiracy and Southern resistance.

However, looked at from a Union perspective, the war was precisely about states' rights, or rather, the denial of them. Abolition was a radical fringe issue in 1856, and hardly mainstream in 1860. Lincoln was the original "stealth" candidate in American history. Had he run as an abolitionist he would have lost to Douglas despite Breckinridge's split of the Democratic Party. He cloaked his abolitionism under a mask of inviolability of the Union. (How many of his admirers believe in divorce?) Yankee sentiment just barely supported Lincoln in his forcible embrace of the South. In the service of abolition the Grand Army of the Republic would have been insufficient to defend the White House privy.

Over the years there has been quite a bit of revisionism on both sides about the "late unpleasantness." Greenberg rightly traces the deconstruction of the Southern myth. When will he start on the Yankee side? I asked a classroom full of college students about Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus. None were aware of it. None were aware that Lincoln arrested and held for six months without charges or trial a large majority of Maryland's state legislature to prevent them from meeting to consider secession. Few textbooks describe the race riots and draft riots in Northern cities, the hiring of substitutes by wealthy draftees, the fact that slavery continued not only as a legal institution but in wide practice in the unseceded slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, the abuse and even sale in those legal states of "contraband" (escaped or liberated slaves) by Yankee officers. And the decade of emancipation was arguably more cruel to the generation that experienced it than the last decade of slavery was to their parents.

Southern revisionism is owned and practiced by a marginal few. Northern "history a la Stalin" strikes me as needing a serious challenge.

--Aristophanes

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