Wanted: "Confederate-Friendly History"
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.”
i am a little surprised no one has mentioned operational military history. There are aspects of Confederate Military operations that deserve attention from historians. The use of combined arms, the use of fixing attacks to hold an opponent in place, use of frontal attacks and why that is seldom a good idea, use of light and irregular forces are areas that come to mind.
I had thought I posted a footnote to the comment I posted on the post a week or two ago about the importance of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War published in 1960 as the lead in to the Civil War memory of the Civil War Centennial. I don't want to get too meta here, but I have returned from my visit to Gallipoli and the monuments there as well as throughout Istanbul and greater Türkiye and can now report that the book on my summer home shelf is in fact the same book I thought I had I inherited from my dad about ten years ago and which sat on the coffee table in my parents' living room from second grade until long after I completed my master's degree in English literature close to three decades later. Remembering that book and re-reading substantial portions of it now through my still ongoing jet lag prompted a stream of consciousness response that I included in my missing footnote. I was prompted to recall reading The Red Badge of Courage in junior high school as part of the curriculum, preceded by an assignment remembered from 7th grade when I was asked to choose a poem to recite before my seventh grade classroom. The dumbest kid in that class was named Murphy Hill. He was six foot two and one hundred and ninety five pounds as a seventh grader and his father had won the Congressional Medal of Honor while serving in the South Pacific. He was a very good-natured kid who intimidated his teachers by his mere presence without any intent to do so. Corporal punishment was the order of the day in 1965 and Murphy set the school record for hacks received in the history of the seventh grade. He was challenged for that record by Gary Jackson, who also got his growth early, and was probably the meanest kid in that school. It was a Navy town and he went out of his way to live up to his family reputation for preying on sailors in downtown Bremerton on Saturday nights. He was a born and raised street fighter who didn't mind displaying his talent in the school parking lot on a fairly regular basis. He 'graduated' to the Job Corps before he'd completed ninth grad. Another Navy kid in that class was Dave Nichols who was working assiduously to write his fourth James Bond novel and in this one he had cast me as the president. He was always asking me for advice about what the president should do in different situations in which he'd placed that character. It gave me an incentive to run for class representative to the Student Council on a promise to reform the school rules for corporal punishment such that a student had to sit on a committee that determined when corporal punishment was appropriate. The poem I read for the class poetry assignment propelled me to victory in the class election. I read a poem called Victor Galbraith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. My memory of that poem has always been that it was a Civil War poem, but in recalling it for this occasion it's occurred to me that it was actually a poem written about the Mexican War and not published until 1858 when the Civil War had become inevitable.