Fighting whitewashed history: A civil eye on the Civil War

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The lowering of Confederate battle flags across the South is not a victory. It's a correction, a small one, and to treat it like a victory is wrong and divisive given the example in Charleston, South Carolina, where the forgiving grace of nine families in funeral corteges is a continuing miracle that makes the head bow with humility.

What good is it to lower flags if it leads to chins raised in defensiveness, defaced statues and suppression of speech? To desentimentalize the Confederate banner and to insist on its removal from statehouse grounds should not mean the wholesale effacement of history. The least-attractive feature of the Confederacy, beyond its inherent brutality, was its intolerance of dissent and determination to hijack the story of the war.

For too long, popular conceptions of the Civil War overwhelmed the truth that it was a war for white supremacy. But overcompensation is not helpful either, and commentators are right to complain of excess when monuments to the long dead are spray-painted and Washington National Cathedral considers breaking its own windows simply because they contain flag imagery that was meant to be conciliatory. The cure, if there is one, is to look with clearer eyes at Civil War history, not to wipe history out. How to find the right line between whitewash and backlash, so the flags are properly furled?

In 1868, Union general George Thomas described better than any modern commentator why the retelling of the Civil War became so contested and how a symbol of racist tyranny like the Confederate battle flag could be romanticized and tolerated at statehouses in the first place:

“The greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty ... suffered violence and wrong when the effort for Southern independence failed,” he wrote. “This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand-in-hand with the defenders of the Government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains.”

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20150712/OPINION03/150719813

[Warren Stupidity]

1. The post war "conciliation" erased almost all of the reconstruction era rights and progress and

resulted in 60 years of legal discrimination against african americans after plessey and decades of near enslavement of the black rural population of the south. There is nothing to be proud of in our post reconstruction history until the civil rights era. There is a lot of shame to spread around and it is not restricted to the south.

[lindysalsagal]

2. Everyone, Americans included, wants a simple, clear story

with big black magic marker lines clearly defining heroes and foes, us and them, right and wrong.

People are never that simple, and so neither is our history.

Eliminating all evidence of slavery would not be in our best interests, either.

But it was a definite obligation to remove that symbol from the state house. No doubt about it.

Even Abraham Lincoln, who everyone wants to be some kind of faultless god, had to bend the rules beyond ethical limitations just to move us ahead and get the law on the books.

The fact that civic equality is still not a default in the 21st century is beyond Lincoln's control. My interpretation is that he did his part when we needed him, and that paved the way for future heroes to continue the evolution.

Humans resist change. We're coming along, some would say not fast enough. But the fact that we got that flag down is a good sign.

It will take another generation, or more, to really be rid of racial discrimination.

[gladium et scutum]

3. I would be cautious in citing

General Thomas. Born in a slave holding family in Southampton County, VA. Thomas bought a slave woman while posted in Texas in the mid-1850s. He never sold her. But after leaving Texas, he took to his home in Virginia. There she remained until freed by the 13th amendment. She did return to his employ in later years.