Wanted: "Confederate-Friendly History"
This morning I read a comment following an announcement for a panel discussion hosted by Emerging Civil War that I will be taking part in on Wednesday evening. As you can see the individual in question is displeased with the fact that I was invited to join this particular panel:
I see you are featuring Kevin Levin, a well-known and highly-touted skeptic of Confederate-friendly history. Who is providing the opposing view? Or, is his the consensus view?
I can’t say that this comment surprises me. I’ve seen some version of it plenty of times over the course of my roughly twenty years of writing online. While I asked for some clarification in response, these sorts of comments almost always tell me more about the author than anything about my own goals as a student of Civil War history and as a historian.
What could it possibly mean to engage in “Confederate-friendly history”? Perhaps it is simply a matter of subscribing to some version of the Lost Cause narrative. Perhaps I’ve gone just a bit too far in emphasizing slavery in my scholarship and online writing. And perhaps I’ve taken too nuanced a position on the subject and controversy surrounding Confederate monuments.
Oh, and let’s not forget my book debunking the Black Confederate narrative.
Let me be clear that I do believe that the right side won the Civil War. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I believe that the United States concluded the war with “clean hands” or that it’s history is immune to criticism, but it does mean that I am thankful that a nation built on the “cornerstone” of slavery did not prevail in its bid for independence.
If that makes me a “skeptic of Confederate-friendly history,” I admit to being guilty as charged.
But there is another sense in which this accusation is patently absurd. I have spent the past twenty-plus years trying as best I can to understand the history of the Confederacy and the broader Civil War era. My library is overflowing with books about the period. I’ve spent countless hours trying to write about it as a way to clarify my own thoughts.
In recent years I have encouraged my readers to resist demonizing Confederates and instead to approach them with the same curiosity, rigor and empathy that ought to drive our attempt to understand any period of history.
The accusation also implicitly suggests that I am somehow more ‘friendly’ toward the history of the Union or the United States, but in recent years I have written extensively warning people not to wrap themselves in simplistic and self-serving narratives of emancipation.
I am currently hard at work on revisions of my biography of Robert Gould Shaw and I anticipate that some people are going to be disappointed by how I interpret Shaw’s evolution over the course of the war, specifically in regard to his attitudes regarding slavery, emancipation, and Black soldiers. Perhaps I will soon read that I am also a ‘skeptic of Union-friendly history.’
In all seriousness, let’s stop with this silliness.
My favorite moments as a student of Civil War history are when my assumptions about the past are challenged and especially in those unsettling moments when I am forced to admit that perhaps I’ve gotten it wrong.
I recently had that experience while reading Edwin P. Rutan’s book High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor, which challenges our tendency to view late recruits and draftees as unpatriotic mercenaries, who made poor soldiers and contributed little to Union victory. How many times have we un-reflectively repeated some version of this narrative in our conversations with others and in our own written work? I know I have.
My focus has always been on trying to understand the Civil War era better by remaining open to revision and having the courage to admit mistakes and missteps. I don’t know any other way forward.
I suspect there is something very seductive about “Confederate-friendly history,” but regardless of what that consists in, it has never held any interest for me.
It suggests a history whose purpose has more to do with satiating one’s own interests and agenda than offering any deep insights into what actually occurred, why, and what it might mean for us today.
Signed,
A “well-known and highly-touted skeptic of Confederate-friendly history.”
Oak Grove 1864
there's a gray boy in the oak grove
a blue boy by his side
a cold wind blows thru the shattered trees
where the gray and the blue boy died
there's a blue boy on a mantle
a father wipes his eyes
a gray boy in a locket
a girl in black just cries
some things that are buried
never do stay that way
they can live for years and years and years
before they fade away
there's a gray boy up in heaven
a blue boy by his side
prayers ascend thru bitter rains
and clouds obscure the sky
blue and gray might be brothers
might be you and me
but the prisoners of those bygone ways
need to be set free
there's a gray boy in the oak grove
a blue boy by his side
hearts were stilled, lives unfulfilled
when the gray and the blue boy died
Malcolm McKinney 2016
"Confederate-friendly history?" What the heck is that?
A book where a drunken Grant surrenders to Lee by mistake? James Thurber did that as a short story.
Oh, the "Black Confederate Soldiers." Right. Find them.
You know, as World War II droned on, Julian Amery, the Fascist, drug-addicted wastrel son of Cabinet Minister Leo Amery, tried to set up a British force in the Wehrmacht, the "Legion of St. George," and attracted from the hundreds of thousands of British Commonwealth service members in the German bag a whopping 48 men willing to exchange battledress brown for Landser gray.
They were the runts of the British military litter, of course, most eager to get out of PoW camps, enjoy the benefits of high living in the Reich (including women), and expected to avoid further combat. They did. The Germans used them for three purposes: propaganda broadcasts to the UK, propaganda appearances in PoW camps to attract recruits, and propaganda appearances in the Reich to show what worthless people British troops were.
They failed at all three. The Legionnaires who went to PoW camps were hooted at, their flyers burned. One Legionnaire, former merchant sailor Walter Purdy, was sent to Colditz as a stool pigeon. Canadian Army VC recipient and peacetime lawyer Col. Cecil Merritt interrogated Purdy harshly and the weak little man gave himself up. The Senior British Officer told the Germans they would not answer for Purdy's safety: get him out of the camp alive or they would turn him over to the Germans dead. The Jerries scurried him away. Purdy did prison time after the war.
Therefore, because of these 48 guys, but the "Confederate-Friendly History" logic, we have to write history books that turn these traitors into heroes....am I right?
I didn't think so.
The Rebs were traitors. So was the Legion of St. George.