In the Land of Cotton: An Immigrant to Dixie Examines the "Lost Cause"
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
by Greg Loren Durand
I was born, raised, and "educated" in Southern California. In the California public school system I was sustained on a steady diet of anti-South propaganda and revisionist history. I was taught that the Republicans, with "Ole Honest Abe" Lincoln at the helm, were responsible for "saving the Union" from those who sought to destroy it in order to perpetuate and extend Southern slavery. As do millions of patriotic American schoolchildren every year, I memorized the Gettysburg Address, listened with rapt attention to stories of the Underground Railroad, and thrilled to read of the military exploits of such Northern Generals as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.
Influenced by a steady barrage of sixty second sound-bites on the evening news and the elaborate, yet fanciful, "reality" concocted by the movie-moguls in Hollywood, a Southern drawl would invoke instant images in my mind of sheet-clad imbeciles dancing around a burning cross, or some beer-bellied, tobacco-spitting "redneck" hurling racial slurs at "persons of color." The "Mason-Dixon Line" was to me an unscalable wall of separation between the socially sophisticated and open-minded North and the morally degenerate and bigoted South. It was a line I never wanted to cross.
However, about ten years ago, I had a "great awakening." Everything that I had been taught about the South and the so-called "Civil War" of 1861-1865 -- more accurately known as the War for Southern Independence -- started to crumble as I began to read what the Southerners themselves had to say. All my life I had been told one side of the story -- that of the victor. But don't the "losers" have a story to tell as well? Was the War really fought over the issue of slavery, as we have been told, or was it fought for other reasons?
It is estimated that only about six percent of Southerners at the outbreak of the war owned any slaves at all, and an even smaller number were wealthy enough to afford the hundreds of laborers which are often associated with Southern agrarianism. It simply was not possible for the average Southern planter to pay $1,500 in cash (that was in gold, not inflated paper "money") per slave; even those who could were frequently to be found picking cotton alongside their slaves. Despite the accounts of Northern Abolitionists of merciless whips and welted backs, of cruel masters and oppressed servants, such were in fact a rarity in the predominantly Christian South. In the late 1930s, the Works Project Administration of the Federal Government collected the testimonies of former slaves throughout the occupied South which are preserved in The Slave Narratives in the National Archives of Washington, D.C. A large majority of those interviewed had fond memories of their masters and mistresses on Southern plantations. For example, Mary Rice, a former slave of Alabama, stated, "Slavery times wuz sho good times. We wuz fed an' clothed an' had nothin' to worry about." Tom Douglas, also from Alabama, reflecting on the "emancipation" brought about by the North, said, "I was happy all de time in slavery days, but dere ain't much to git happy over now." Gus Brown of Richmond, Virginia remembered his former master with these words: "I cannot forget old massa. He was good and kind.... I knows I will see him in heaven...."
Let us not forget that, whether it was right or wrong, slavery was protected by the "supreme law of the land" -- the Constitution for the United States of America -- and as such, all those who held public office in Washington D.C. were bound by oath to ensure its continued protection. Only a constitutional amendment, proposed by a two-thirds vote in Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the States could bring about a lawful change in that document. Abraham Lincoln knew this to be true, and said so in his first inaugural speech on the steps of the Capital: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
In his speech at Peoria, Illinois on 16 October 1854, he revealed his true feelings toward the Black man by declaring, "Free [the slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this.... We cannot make them equals."
In his reply to Stephen Douglas on 18 September 1858, scarcely five years before he issued his celebrated Emancipation Proclamation and altered the course of the war to an attack on Southern slavery as a calculated "war measure" to cripple the "enemy," Lincoln stated:
I will say... that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about, in any way, a social and political equality of the White and Black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people.
[T]here is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together in terms of social and political equality. And in so much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
No White supremist group in our own day could have stated their views with any more clarity, and yet such a man now sits enthroned in Washington D.C. as the very incarnation of the "American spirit" of freedom and equality and the hallowed patron saint of the Civil Rights movement.
It is not widely known that the Southern State of Virginia was the very first political body in the entire world to enact legislation to end the slave trade. On 5 October 1778, the General Assembly passed "An act for preventing the further importation of slaves," in which "any slave brought into the state contrary to the law would be then and forevermore free." In keeping with such opposition to the wickedness of the slave trade, the Constitution of the Confederate States of 1861 permanently abolished the practice in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1. Confederate President Jefferson Davis made clear his plans for the infant country when he stated, "The slave must be made fit for his freedom by education and discipline and thus be made unfit for slavery."
It was Davis' prediction that slavery "will eventually be lost"; it had outlived its usefulness and would inevitably die a natural death. Although there were indeed some who believed that the natural condition of the Black man was servitude, a widely-held opinion in the South was that of gradual emancipation. Some Southern leaders, such as General Robert Edward Lee, were wholly opposed to African slavery.
Let the reader contrast such sentiments with the actions of the invading Northern forces. In a letter to General Grant, General John A. Logan reported that his men were "capturing negroes, with or with out their consent.... They are being conscripted." In 1864, General Innis N. Palmer wrote to General Butler, "The negroes will not go voluntarily, so I am obliged to force them." And at the same time Black men were being taken against their will into "service" to the United States, Yankee soldiers were "committing rapes on the negroes" and were "in the negro huts for weeks, debauching the females." A war to free the slaves? Only a deluded mind would believe such nonsense.
What then would inspire a vast majority of non-slaveholding Confederates, many of whom were as young as fourteen years of age, to shoulder their muskets and charge with resolve into the very face of death? What gave these men the mental fortitude and courage to stand firm in their defiance of the mightiest war machine the world had seen up to that time? I firmly believe that the rag-tag "Rebels" were motivated by their love for hearth and home. These men deserve to be honored for withstanding tremendous odds in an attempt to secure for future generations of Southerners the eternal "blessings of liberty." In the words of one Confederate soldier: "I was a soldier in Virginia in the campaigns of Lee and Jackson, and I declare I never met a Southern soldier who had drawn his sword to perpetuate slavery.... What he had chiefly at heart was the preservation of the supreme and sacred right of self-government."
Even the editors of the London Times acknowledged this to be true when they stated on 7 November 1861, "The contest is really for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South...."
That is why, upon moving to my adopted and now-beloved Southern homeland, I promptly and proudly hoisted a Confederate Battle Flag above my home. This Yankee-born convert to the "Lost Cause" feels his heart swell with pride and love for the Old South when he sees the Battle Flag floating majestically in the breeze and sometimes even gets a lump in the throat when he hears the sweet strains of "Dixie." My own ancestors "wore the blue," but I now make my stand with the "boys in grey" and wait for the day when native Southerners will no longer be ashamed of their rich heritage and will join with those who are turning their backs on the siren song of modernity in order to return to the cherished principles of the past.
Deo Vindice!
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