When I registered with the Selective Service System and was issued my draft card on my seventeenth birthday I had been a resident of Galveston County for less than a month. I had lived the previous ten years near Seattle. Before that I had lived in Topeka, KS for three years, following four years in Lawrence on the KU campus where I was born. My dad earned his doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Kansas and commuted daily from Lawrence to Topeka in a carpool to his job at the Topeka VA where he had done the research for writing his dissertation. On completing his dissertation he made a trip to the VA Hospital in St. Louis at Jefferson Barracks by way of Cedar Rapids IA where his mother had just died and Chippewa Falls where she was buried. After his mother's funeral he attended an orientation at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis where his new boss, Dr. Karl Menninger, Director and Founder of the world famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka, introduced him to the guest speaker, Margaret Mead. Fifty years later, on a Skype call from Manila where I lived at the time, I explained to my dad that he had unwittingly visited the site where his great grandfather lived the last month of his life as a Union soldier at the Jefferson Barracks Hospital and remains buried in the Civil War section of the National Cemetery that adjoins the hospital. One of my oldest memories is standing on a train platform at age three with my mother, a sister one year older, another one year younger, greeting my dad when he got off the train on returning from this trip.
My apologies for being late to the party. (We are tiling the floor in a bathroom; priorities.) This is a verbal faux pas that I make all too often, but there is a sense in which it is correct, even if we are all careless about it.
"The South" lost the Civil War in the sense that the established social/political order in "the South" lost the war. Sadly, they then proceeded to "win Reconstruction." (An online friend, an established prof at a major university, once characterized the Civil War as a close basketball game which the North won, but the South convinced some of the players on both teams to continue, just for fun, and then the South won that "overtime" period by much more than the North had won the regulation game and therefore declared they had won the original game.)
Your larger point stands: There are many "Souths" and only one of those lost the Civil War. We (and I do include myself here) must do better with our language. (I say this as someone not enamored with the shift to "enslaved"/"enslaver," but that is a discussion for another time, perhaps.)
Thanks for the comment. Just for the record, if I receive a comment from you in another month and it includes a reference to tiling the floor, may I suggest that it is time to bring in a professional. Good luck.
I am not so sure we can say "the South" won Reconstruction. Certainly white Southerners bent on "redeeming" their communities succeeded, but that didn't include all white Southerners and obviously Black Southerners as well. Perhaps it is time to move beyond these regional generalizations for the sake of historical accuracy and an acknowledgement of the region's complexity. That said, they are useful and I find myself falling back on them.
(GWE should finish the actual tiling today. Because of the need to get this functionally done by Thursday---working toilet, scheduled for Wednesday---some largely cosmetic work will be finished after the holidays. We couldn't get professionals to take the job because it is so small.) Back to business: Again, if we follow the common-but-misplaced assumption that "the South" in these conversations refers to the established (i.e., antebellum) social/political order, then I think "the South" did win Reconstruction. But your larger point still stands, and the black population of the South certainly did not "win" Reconstruction. The notion that "the South = the Confederacy" is one of the more odious remnants of the Lost Cause, one that I have been far too complicit in perpetuating.
As a 67-year-old white woman who was born and grew up in the Deep South in a Georgia county that did not yet exist in 1860, I thank you for writing this too.
Although graves in north Georgia, where ancestors on both my paternal and maternal sides are buried, some with chiseled headstones memorializing the Confederate companies in which they fought, I somehow avoided absorbing the "Lost Cause" ideology. I have some theories about why, but I digress. Even so, I recall as a young person being asked by a person whose family wasn't yet in the country in 1860 why we "couldn't let go of the Civil War" when I was far more interested in the Revolutionary War. And I remember having telephone operators in northern cities laugh at my Southern accent and university professors from Ivy League schools express genuine surprise that I—a girl AND a Southerner—had the highest grades in most of my math classes. It's quite easy to lump people into groups—to project onto entire groups of people based on any number of characteristics—including geographic regions—we all do it to an extent. It's a way to try and contain our fear of the unknown, even fears that we didn't have until someone with an agenda (money or power or both) exploits us and tells us lies—like being against all immigrants because they're cat-eaters. All Southerners are stupid and ignorant Confederate flag-waving morons because someone said it and no one challenged it.
As a child, I saw "colored" and "white" waiting rooms at my doctor's office, asked my mother why the Black friend I'd just played with in a cotton field (really) couldn't sit with us in the movie theatre, and as late as 2010, was invited to a high school "class" reunion and then told offline that it was a "white only" reunion. I said no initially, because I said that half the people I wanted to see wouldn't be there, and then, mysteriously, it became a "true" class reunion and I decided to go. I don't know if I had any influence on that decision, but I hope so. I haven't been back, so I don't know if they kept it up. (By the time I graduated, less than a decade after court-ordered desegregation took place, the class was 51% Black and 49% white.)
I can't defend any of that. I couldn't reconcile it when I was a child then and I can't now. Sadly, I can report that the majority of voters in my home county couldn't bring themselves to vote for a highly qualified multi-racial woman for president, but at the same time, quite a few more than I expected did. Having said all that, though, I will remind you that until Vietnam, people who lived in the Confederate states were the ONLY WHITE AMERICANS TO LOSE A WAR and suffer the ignominy of that, despite the fact that the "cause" for which they were fighting was morally reprehensible. It's only been 150 years—three generations. No excuse, just an explanation. We anomalous reading and thinking Southerners were there in 1860 and we're still here.
I don't have any answers for how to speed the arc of justice and reconciliation, but keep writing about it, Kevin. Keep teaching and leading tours and sharing your rigorously gathered facts. And so will I.
Wonderful comment. Thanks so much for sharing your personal story. You will definitely enjoy reading Howell Raines's recent book, Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Out of History. It's part history/family history and part personal journey.
It may be even more accurate to say that the Army of Northern Virginia under command of RE Lee lost the Civil War. Once Lee surrendered , the dominos kept falling...even among the political and popular pleas for guerilla war and other forms of resistance. The largest surrender which never gets talked about was to Gen Sherman at Bennett Place on April 27...90,000 CSA troops... and there were more surrenders after that. Without Lee and the ANV the Confederate army backbone was broken and their supreme military leader was out of the game. Pres Johnson did not declare the war over until August of 1866. ...and as you observe many in the South have never given up.
Also, I am reminded every time I see either a Confederate flag being flown next to an American flag of the difference between Confederacy, a mindset of separation, and the South, a collection of states, not a political mindset.
When the person flying both flags is asked about it, the answer, invariably, is “it is my culture, my legacy.” When I ask why he flies the flag of a losing opponent, well, let me just say, that is not a question to ask when within arm’s reach!
The other part of this, of course, is the definition of “lose.” As historian Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s marvelous book wrote, one wonders if the South didn’t actually WIN the war. Sure, they lost the battles, but look where the partisan political parties are now…
I understand and respect your point, but isn’t this what history does? Our government committed genocide against the Native Americans, even though there were many at the time that were against that treatment. Now the stain of those efforts is on all of us. The same could be said of slavery. Or of many other conflicts and issues throughout history.
My point is we lump the south in with the confederacy because that’s what people do with history (the clumsy examples in my initial reply were my effort to make to make that point). Our actions towards Native Americans or African American slaves are a collective stain on all of us. As the actions of the Confederacy is a collective stain on the South.
And to be clear I am not disagreeing with you and get what you’re saying (I think 🤣). I’m just trying to point out that this seems to be a natural response to stuff like that. Whether justified or not.
I am certainly aware of this, but I am not sure what point you are trying to make. What does this have to do with how we think about the relationship between the South and the Confederacy? Thanks.
I have many years studying this topic and it has made me skeptical of historians and people who present history to the public. The destruction of this history cannot be all attributed to the Lost Cause.
The link below is to a Southern man captured at Fort Pillow, he was one of the survivors. The men under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest would steal everything he had so he had nothing to trade when he and his comrades arrived at Andersonville. He is buried there with other soldiers from Bradford's Battalion, 13th Regiment, Tennessee Cavalry.
Thanks for the comment, Richard, but I am not sure what you mean when referencing skepticism of historians on this subject as it relates to public history. Can you elaborate a bit? Thanks.
My great great grandfather was the county clerk in Cherokee County , NC. He remained neutral during the war, however when he asked for remuneration after the war, for horses, a saddle, and a wagon taken by the Union army, his claim was denied because he gave salt to starving families, some who were confederates.
Thanks for the comment. The story of your ancestor speaks to the very complexity that I tried to sketch in this post. How do you prove your loyalty in a state that seceded from the Union?
Speaking of word choice, interesting to me is the premise underlying the basic framing: Lincoln’s presidency was apparently defined NOT by winning the Civil War but by the South losing it. That framing not just deprives him of credit but casts him as villain.
When I registered with the Selective Service System and was issued my draft card on my seventeenth birthday I had been a resident of Galveston County for less than a month. I had lived the previous ten years near Seattle. Before that I had lived in Topeka, KS for three years, following four years in Lawrence on the KU campus where I was born. My dad earned his doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Kansas and commuted daily from Lawrence to Topeka in a carpool to his job at the Topeka VA where he had done the research for writing his dissertation. On completing his dissertation he made a trip to the VA Hospital in St. Louis at Jefferson Barracks by way of Cedar Rapids IA where his mother had just died and Chippewa Falls where she was buried. After his mother's funeral he attended an orientation at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis where his new boss, Dr. Karl Menninger, Director and Founder of the world famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka, introduced him to the guest speaker, Margaret Mead. Fifty years later, on a Skype call from Manila where I lived at the time, I explained to my dad that he had unwittingly visited the site where his great grandfather lived the last month of his life as a Union soldier at the Jefferson Barracks Hospital and remains buried in the Civil War section of the National Cemetery that adjoins the hospital. One of my oldest memories is standing on a train platform at age three with my mother, a sister one year older, another one year younger, greeting my dad when he got off the train on returning from this trip.
I learned about the Readjusters from a reference to them in Toni Morrison. https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-readjuster-party-in-toni-morrisons.html
It is a rare reference in popular culture. Thanks for sharing, Andrew.
My apologies for being late to the party. (We are tiling the floor in a bathroom; priorities.) This is a verbal faux pas that I make all too often, but there is a sense in which it is correct, even if we are all careless about it.
"The South" lost the Civil War in the sense that the established social/political order in "the South" lost the war. Sadly, they then proceeded to "win Reconstruction." (An online friend, an established prof at a major university, once characterized the Civil War as a close basketball game which the North won, but the South convinced some of the players on both teams to continue, just for fun, and then the South won that "overtime" period by much more than the North had won the regulation game and therefore declared they had won the original game.)
Your larger point stands: There are many "Souths" and only one of those lost the Civil War. We (and I do include myself here) must do better with our language. (I say this as someone not enamored with the shift to "enslaved"/"enslaver," but that is a discussion for another time, perhaps.)
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the comment. Just for the record, if I receive a comment from you in another month and it includes a reference to tiling the floor, may I suggest that it is time to bring in a professional. Good luck.
I am not so sure we can say "the South" won Reconstruction. Certainly white Southerners bent on "redeeming" their communities succeeded, but that didn't include all white Southerners and obviously Black Southerners as well. Perhaps it is time to move beyond these regional generalizations for the sake of historical accuracy and an acknowledgement of the region's complexity. That said, they are useful and I find myself falling back on them.
(GWE should finish the actual tiling today. Because of the need to get this functionally done by Thursday---working toilet, scheduled for Wednesday---some largely cosmetic work will be finished after the holidays. We couldn't get professionals to take the job because it is so small.) Back to business: Again, if we follow the common-but-misplaced assumption that "the South" in these conversations refers to the established (i.e., antebellum) social/political order, then I think "the South" did win Reconstruction. But your larger point still stands, and the black population of the South certainly did not "win" Reconstruction. The notion that "the South = the Confederacy" is one of the more odious remnants of the Lost Cause, one that I have been far too complicit in perpetuating.
As a 67-year-old white woman who was born and grew up in the Deep South in a Georgia county that did not yet exist in 1860, I thank you for writing this too.
Although graves in north Georgia, where ancestors on both my paternal and maternal sides are buried, some with chiseled headstones memorializing the Confederate companies in which they fought, I somehow avoided absorbing the "Lost Cause" ideology. I have some theories about why, but I digress. Even so, I recall as a young person being asked by a person whose family wasn't yet in the country in 1860 why we "couldn't let go of the Civil War" when I was far more interested in the Revolutionary War. And I remember having telephone operators in northern cities laugh at my Southern accent and university professors from Ivy League schools express genuine surprise that I—a girl AND a Southerner—had the highest grades in most of my math classes. It's quite easy to lump people into groups—to project onto entire groups of people based on any number of characteristics—including geographic regions—we all do it to an extent. It's a way to try and contain our fear of the unknown, even fears that we didn't have until someone with an agenda (money or power or both) exploits us and tells us lies—like being against all immigrants because they're cat-eaters. All Southerners are stupid and ignorant Confederate flag-waving morons because someone said it and no one challenged it.
As a child, I saw "colored" and "white" waiting rooms at my doctor's office, asked my mother why the Black friend I'd just played with in a cotton field (really) couldn't sit with us in the movie theatre, and as late as 2010, was invited to a high school "class" reunion and then told offline that it was a "white only" reunion. I said no initially, because I said that half the people I wanted to see wouldn't be there, and then, mysteriously, it became a "true" class reunion and I decided to go. I don't know if I had any influence on that decision, but I hope so. I haven't been back, so I don't know if they kept it up. (By the time I graduated, less than a decade after court-ordered desegregation took place, the class was 51% Black and 49% white.)
I can't defend any of that. I couldn't reconcile it when I was a child then and I can't now. Sadly, I can report that the majority of voters in my home county couldn't bring themselves to vote for a highly qualified multi-racial woman for president, but at the same time, quite a few more than I expected did. Having said all that, though, I will remind you that until Vietnam, people who lived in the Confederate states were the ONLY WHITE AMERICANS TO LOSE A WAR and suffer the ignominy of that, despite the fact that the "cause" for which they were fighting was morally reprehensible. It's only been 150 years—three generations. No excuse, just an explanation. We anomalous reading and thinking Southerners were there in 1860 and we're still here.
I don't have any answers for how to speed the arc of justice and reconciliation, but keep writing about it, Kevin. Keep teaching and leading tours and sharing your rigorously gathered facts. And so will I.
Hi Vally,
Wonderful comment. Thanks so much for sharing your personal story. You will definitely enjoy reading Howell Raines's recent book, Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Out of History. It's part history/family history and part personal journey.
https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Cavalry-Soldiers-Alabama-Atlanta/dp/0593137752/ref=sr_1_2?crid=IEM53R98CP5I&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Lw-GXOh4AHvQiu0fEa1wE4ErzlVCjS9sHuQweIsvbPGJs1msZ45Bs9J_pXvxvG3j4qrGXrPwroQy8fuBI0SKL7FVVXbLX65-1WAE1bvsqGqd8cVnGerKPQITuPid7SUfN_QL8B7fk_tjjLyDRBReADB9UqMFp43pHxam5U5z5lK9Ixsp2lwczpi4ZVfUJcvf5BzFYmVy_01i_ZA8SFAHn3bQGOpTfvZEnDDc19lMdgo.reKelKI4xfH7j1goYvFJK6b60WDT72lhE6lknhNYb54&dib_tag=se&keywords=alabama+unionists&qid=1732525920&sprefix=alabama+unionists%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-2
Such a thought-provoking post. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Thanks for reading, Joanne.
It may be even more accurate to say that the Army of Northern Virginia under command of RE Lee lost the Civil War. Once Lee surrendered , the dominos kept falling...even among the political and popular pleas for guerilla war and other forms of resistance. The largest surrender which never gets talked about was to Gen Sherman at Bennett Place on April 27...90,000 CSA troops... and there were more surrenders after that. Without Lee and the ANV the Confederate army backbone was broken and their supreme military leader was out of the game. Pres Johnson did not declare the war over until August of 1866. ...and as you observe many in the South have never given up.
There is no question that many people viewed Lee’s surrender as the end of military affairs in 1865.
Also, I am reminded every time I see either a Confederate flag being flown next to an American flag of the difference between Confederacy, a mindset of separation, and the South, a collection of states, not a political mindset.
When the person flying both flags is asked about it, the answer, invariably, is “it is my culture, my legacy.” When I ask why he flies the flag of a losing opponent, well, let me just say, that is not a question to ask when within arm’s reach!
The other part of this, of course, is the definition of “lose.” As historian Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s marvelous book wrote, one wonders if the South didn’t actually WIN the war. Sure, they lost the battles, but look where the partisan political parties are now…
It’s a good book, but Heather is talking about a much longer history.
Oh yes, she is.
Good work here.
Thanks, Malcolm.
I understand and respect your point, but isn’t this what history does? Our government committed genocide against the Native Americans, even though there were many at the time that were against that treatment. Now the stain of those efforts is on all of us. The same could be said of slavery. Or of many other conflicts and issues throughout history.
My point is we lump the south in with the confederacy because that’s what people do with history (the clumsy examples in my initial reply were my effort to make to make that point). Our actions towards Native Americans or African American slaves are a collective stain on all of us. As the actions of the Confederacy is a collective stain on the South.
And to be clear I am not disagreeing with you and get what you’re saying (I think 🤣). I’m just trying to point out that this seems to be a natural response to stuff like that. Whether justified or not.
Regardless, I enjoyed your piece!
I am certainly aware of this, but I am not sure what point you are trying to make. What does this have to do with how we think about the relationship between the South and the Confederacy? Thanks.
I have many years studying this topic and it has made me skeptical of historians and people who present history to the public. The destruction of this history cannot be all attributed to the Lost Cause.
The link below is to a Southern man captured at Fort Pillow, he was one of the survivors. The men under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest would steal everything he had so he had nothing to trade when he and his comrades arrived at Andersonville. He is buried there with other soldiers from Bradford's Battalion, 13th Regiment, Tennessee Cavalry.
https://southernsky1861.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/img_7143.jpg
Thanks for the comment, Richard, but I am not sure what you mean when referencing skepticism of historians on this subject as it relates to public history. Can you elaborate a bit? Thanks.
Thanks for doing this! It is SO important to remember and focus upon the nuances.
My great great grandfather was the county clerk in Cherokee County , NC. He remained neutral during the war, however when he asked for remuneration after the war, for horses, a saddle, and a wagon taken by the Union army, his claim was denied because he gave salt to starving families, some who were confederates.
https://www.fold3.com/file/18819/drury-weeks-us-southern-claims-barred-and-disallowed-1871?terms=weeks,drury
Hi Patt,
Thanks for the comment. The story of your ancestor speaks to the very complexity that I tried to sketch in this post. How do you prove your loyalty in a state that seceded from the Union?
Speaking of word choice, interesting to me is the premise underlying the basic framing: Lincoln’s presidency was apparently defined NOT by winning the Civil War but by the South losing it. That framing not just deprives him of credit but casts him as villain.
Exactly. He died because he won that war. Talk about no greater sacrifice. Whew!
That is such a great point, Chris. Thanks.