The Right Way to Remember the Confederacy

From historian William Davis, at the Wall Street Journal:

The shibboleth that “state rights” caused secession is a suit of clothes desperately lacking an emperor. Only slavery (and its surrounding economic and political issues) had the power to propel white Southerners to disunion and, ultimately, war. Ironically, by taking a course that led to a war that they lost, the Confederates themselves launched the juggernaut that led to emancipation. To understand how freedom and justice came, why it was delayed for a century after the Civil War and why today so much mistrust and misunderstanding persists between black and white Americans, the vital starting point remains the Confederacy.

Should African-Americans even care about the individual “heroes” of the Confederacy? It might help to know that some of them were black too, including men like the enslaved Charleston steamer pilot Robert Smalls, who boldly stole a Confederate steamboat on May 13, 1862, and took his family and the families of his crew past the cannons ringing Charleston’s harbor to reach freedom with the blockading Union fleet. More interesting might be those brave Southern black men and women who carried on a clandestine opposition during the war to help the Union. And many might be surprised to learn of the tens of thousands of white Southerners who opposed both slavery and the Confederacy. After the war, a few leaders even accepted the new U.S. order and espoused full citizenship for freedmen. Without preserving the Confederate story, we risk losing the memories of all those other genuine heroes.

In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.

The Confederacy was almost as deeply riven with dissent as the U.S. is today, and yet it stopped short of draconian restrictions on free speech (at least for the whites it considered full citizens). By their own lights, its leaders overwhelmingly remained committed to constitutional authority and elected civil government—even in the last year of the war, when the military situation grew so desperate that some prominent leaders called for the unconstitutional overthrow of President Davis and the installation of Lee as military dictator.

To the end, the Confederates’ leaders believed in democracy as they conceived it. In the last months of the war, some of their civil and military leaders, briefly including Lee himself, worked to bring about a negotiated peace with the North that would have ended slavery and the Confederacy in return for guarantees of continued government in the Southern states by the consent of the white population. The Confederates were seen at the time as traitors by the North, and they are seen as racists down to the present day, but in the main, they sincerely believed that they were holding true to the guiding principles of democracy.

To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, America has ever been a laboratory for that democracy. The Confederacy is its most notable failed experiment. The debate over the relation of the states to the federal government had been present since independence. The idea that secession was an alternative if conflicts over sovereignty couldn’t be resolved arose often enough that it was likely to be tried eventually, and so the Confederates tried. They failed. But good scientists don’t erase their laboratory failures; they learn from them...

Stogie's not going to like this essay, obviously, because Davis doesn't adopt the "evil" North, "virtuous" South ideological template. There are good reasons for preserving the Confederate flag while recognizing that it's a divisive symbol for millions of Americans. Demonizing those Americans, which is what Stogie does, is not going to bring about the preservation of that heritage.

But RTWT at that top link.