The Stories We Tell
/My newspaper column on Sunday – about Civil War history and Confederate monuments – drew lots of reader responses from Memphis, Nashville, Oak Ridge, Knoxville, and other points east. (Read it over on the Columns page.) By a wide margin, most of the comments were positive.
Notes like these from readers are not only nice for a columnist to see but, at this particular moment and on this issue, were also deeply encouraging to me about our society. Here are some of the “candles in the darkness” I’ve found in my inbox since Sunday morning...
“I applaud your suggestion to reintroduce civics and history to our classrooms.”
“Your column this morning was perfect…well deserved outrage without going over the top in enmity.”
“One of the most thoughtful editorials I have ever read from anyone. It is timely and stated a perspective I had not previously considered.”
“For too long, southern devotees have hidden behind the mantra of preserving American history through the maintenance of these revered icons. Statues do more than preserve; they perpetuate the southern myth, and you were spot-on to call out the irony of such a fallacious argument.”
But a handful of readers took issue with my stand on what the Civil War was about.
For these few, the rebellion wasn’t about slavery but how some southern states just wanted to do whatever they wanted. (This is the old “states’ rights” view. It’s not a new argument, of course, just a tired one.) Frankly, it’s a point of view that had no longer interested me much – not until this current moment of national rancor, in which race figures so prominently.
Hear them now…
“While abolishing slavery was a by-product, the overriding reason for the Civil War was the over-reach of the Federal Government over States rights. The industrial minded North was attempting to bully the much more agrarian Southern States. They attempted to tax and legislate the South into being subservient to the more aggressive minded North.”
“Revisionist history has stripped away the actual reasons for the Civil War to make it all about slavery, which was not the case. And a majority of Confederate soldiers came from families who did not own slaves… They were fighting to defend their country which had been attacked. The statues were erected to honor these soldiers.”
“It was never the goal of the Confederacy to topple the U.S. government. The former states composing the Confederacy simply wanted to withdraw from the Union. The reason for the withdrawal may have been the continuation of the plantation slave economy, but it could have been for countless other reasons as well… Abraham Lincoln essentially declared martial law, raised an army, and militarily forced the withdrawn states back into the Union.”
I don’t question these readers on their shared beliefs nor the durability of this view. But comments like these do strike me as current examples of what Dr. W.E.B. DuBois once called “lies agreed upon.” They still survive by way of the stories we tell ourselves, as they have been across our defeated region for a long century.
Here I will quote from just one more note from another reader, this one in Sumner County, who wrote in on Sunday. The words stopped me in my tracks.
He shared with me what he had seen while doing family genealogy research, at the courthouse up in Gallatin. They were from an old county ledger book of commercial transactions, back in 1811. (This was long before the start of hostilities that split the Union, but not before the heartache of slavery was already splitting families at the auction blocks.) These pages recorded two sales of four enslaved children:
Negro boy Stephen 8, for $275. 24 Jul 1811. p. 218.
Three Negro girls, Pheba 8, Matilda 6, Milly 3, for $325. p. 219-20.
None of them was older than eight. Milly was only three.
Each of us now living inside the old boundaries of the Old South must reach our own reckoning with these matters. And to that monument question, I say: Don’t erase any history at all - just, please, remember the rest of it. Don’t ignore what human bondage did to its victims, how it scattered enslaved families to the four winds in the day, and all that that legacy has left us to deal with here in our day.
Remember the Generals and laud them even now, if you must, but remember little Stephen, Pheba, Matilda, and Milly, too. None of our history should be ignored.
None of it.
© Keel Hunt, 2020
