On a recent church discussion thread on Facebook, a member of my church body made what was a virtual throwaway comment that the Confederates were "traitors" and that their monuments should never have been erected. Ironically, his remarks were in the context that he felt that some political opinions of others were disrespectful of his ethnic heritage. It was a classic moment of projection. We are now to the point where no dissenting views of American historiography are tolerated, and it is acceptable to say hateful things about certain other ethnicities in the name of "tolerance. It is downright Orwellian.
I chose not to engage the issue on that forum - which was dedicated to Lutheran education.
This issue is personal to me, as my heritage came from Ground Zero of this conflict between the two sides of the War Between the States. My folks were Virginians - from what is today West Virginia. Every branch of my family tree was affected by the conflict - some on either side.
One of my great-great-great-grandfathers, Thomas Benton McLaughlin, was a Union veteran who served with the 10th West Virginia Infantry. After the war, he enjoyed a career with the Federal government in the Department of the Treasury. He enjoyed a good pension that was secured to Union veterans by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) veterans' lobby.
Prior to his death in 1911, he became close to his granddaughter Mamie Bryan McLaughlin, who was born in 1900. Her family was broken, and her grandfather was kind to her. His love and affection made a huge impression on her. Mamie was my great-grandmother whom we used to visit every Sunday when I was a child. We were very close. She knew all of her grandparents and other family members - and I grew up knowing my heritage and feeling a sense of connection to my family. These were not theoretical characters in a book or marble statues, but my flesh and blood. I was only one link removed from her grandfather who was born in 1839!
Thomas McLaughlin fought in the Union army because his wife's family were Union sympathizers. The rest of the family was not. His brothers Richard and James wore the gray and fought for Virginia in the 25th Infantry regiment. The family did not own slaves. It's hard enough to grow potatoes in West Virginia, let alone cotton. Virginia was not enthusiastic about secession, and initially opted to remain in the Union. But when Lincoln ordered the invasion of South Carolina, Virginia decided to defend its fellow Southern state from military aggression, and seceded from the Union. A new confederation of states was formed, and the Confederate States of America raised military forces from the various state militias and fought in defense of its declaration of independence. Young men across the South volunteered to defend hearth and home from invasion.
At the top of this blogpost is a representation of the regimental flag of the 25th Virginia Infantry. You can see on the banner some of the horrific battles this unit took part in. Their story is not unlike those of regiments all across the now-United States. The battles the regiment fought in in its four years were: Rich Mountain, Cheat Mountain, Jackson's Valley Campaign, Seven Days' Battles, 2nd Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Siege of Suffolk, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, the Valley Campaigns of 1864, and the Appomattox Campaign.
My uncle
Richard Johnson McLaughlin enlisted at the war's beginning at age 19. He was wounded in the knee at Gettysburg and captured. He was paroled and exchanged three months later. He returned to his unit and was again captured at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse. He was imprisoned at Point Lookout POW camp in Maryland, where he died three months later of inflammation of the lungs at age 23. Point Lookout had a world-class hospital onsite, but prisoners were not admitted. They had to make do with primitive field hospitals. More than 4,000 prisoners whose names are known perished there. Estimates are that as many as 8,000 actually died there, as many names have been found in records that are not recorded on the site's monument.
His brother
James Buchanan McLaughlin, obviously also my uncle, enlisted with his brother at age 18. He was captured at the Wilderness and sent to the POW camp at Belle Plain, then on to Point Lookout where his brother died - after which, he was sent to the notorious Elmira Camp in New York - which housed 12,000 prisoners and boasted a 25% death rate. He survived ten months before taking the oath of loyalty to the United States after the war's end. After returning home, he married and had a family of ten children. He died in 1940 at the age of 97 in Glendon, West Virginia. His
brief account of his war service has survived.
Americans across the North and South continued to honor their veterans during their lifetime and beyond. The United Confederate Veterans (UCV) chose the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) as its successor. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) did the same with the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW). Both the SCV and the SUVCW still exist today, as does the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). These are hereditary societies that honor their veterans and keep the family history alive.
My Southern ancestors had a rougher go of it post-war than my grandfather Thomas McLaughlin. Pensions for the Confederate veterans had to come out of state budgets - and the states were decimated by the war. The federal government did however recognize the service of the Confederate veterans and supplied tombstones for them and allowed them to be buried in national cemeteries. As the men of that generation were dying off, the federal government decreed that Confederate veterans were legally U.S. veterans and entitled to the same benefits as their Union counterparts.
Whether or not the Confederates were traitors has nothing to do with slavery or whether your family wore the blue or the gray. It is an objective legal question relating to the nature of the Constitutional Union and a moral question based on natural rights. The United States of America was itself formed by thirteen acts of secession from the British Empire, as well as a confederation of states in defense against the spurned "mother country" who declared the seceding states to be in a state of rebellion.
At very least, if Robert E. Lee is to be denigrated as a traitor, so must George Washington be.
Secession is one way in which new governments - governments recognized by the United States and the world - are formed. Texas seceded from Mexico. Panama seceded from Columbia. Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia seceded from the Soviet Union. South Sudan seceded from Sudan. And of course, every July 4th, Americans celebrate "Independence Day" - honoring the joint act of secession by the original 13 United States from Great Britain. Surely, the participants in all of those acts of secession are not to be denigrated.
Of course, a legal argument regarding the nature of the US Constitution can be made both ways: the Hamiltonian "national" historiography or the Jeffersonian "compact" view of the Constitution. The fact that the former has become politically correct - largely by a kind of guilt by association of the latter with slavery - is irrelevant to the question. Whether or not the Confederates were traitors is a legal question regarding secession, and that question has nothing to do with slavery. There were slave-owners and non-slave-owners on both sides of the secession issue in both north and south. In Louisiana, the largest plantations of slave-owners actually favored the status quo, and those parishes were most loyal to the Union. And the converse is also true: the parishes with little slave ownership were more willing to take a risk on secession and confederation with the other Southern states.
Interestingly, after the war ended, there were no treason trials. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was held as a POW for two years, but was bailed out and all charges were dropped. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, was of the opinion that it was too risky to try Davis for treason - as there was a risk that he might win his case and vindicate the South. There was a general amnesty, and as both sections worked to reunify the country, both sides honored their war dead. In fact, the veterans who wore the blue and gray held joint reunions. In 1894, Mississippi incorporated the Confederate battle flag into its state flag. On into the 20th century, US presidents dedicated monuments to the men on both sides of the conflict who wore the uniform and died for their respective American countries - now reunified into one nation.
All over the country, the veterans were honored in parades, and as their numbers dwindled, monuments were erected in their honor. At the fifty year point, there was an upsurge in interest in honoring all of the veterans. In 1913, a joint reunion was held at Gettysburg. Amazingly, the few remaining survivors met again in 1938 to celebrate the 75th anniversary! More monuments went up as the last remaining veterans were dying off. In the late 1950s, as the 1961 centennial of the war approached, there was great nostalgia in movies, TV shows, and pop songs. President Eisenhower (a great student of the war and admirer of General Robert E. Lee) urged each state to take proactive measures to honor their respective War Between the States veterans and history. A few days later, Judge Bell of Georgia submitted a redesigned memorial state flag incorporating the Confederate battle flag.
However, the historiography taught in schools over the past several decades has been shaped by textbooks by openly Socialist historians such as Howard Zinn and Eric Foner. Their Marxist lens and northern bias has become the mainstream historiography in nearly every public and private school in America. Over time, the Confederate cause has been vilified. And this Marxist bias has resulted in the removal of not only monuments to Confederate veterans, but even movements to remove (some of which have been successful) tributes to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lewis and Clark, Christopher Columbus, and even people like the musician Stephen Foster and actors Lillian Gish and John Wayne. Schools in Louisiana named after President George Washington and Governor Francis Nicholls were renamed because of political correctness. There is an iconoclastic witch hunt to tear down monuments and plaques to anyone from the past who does not conform to our current acceptable mores.
And unfortunately, our country is becoming less literate, more angry, less devoted to the past, intolerant, and increasingly ignorant of even the most basic facts of American history. It is also becoming oppressive to hold a view contrary to the Marxist historiography, as violence against someone defending a dissenting historiography is not uncommon - especially on college campuses.
Those of us who honor our ancestors who fought for the Confederate States of America, and even those who simply appreciate the other side of the story to get a deeper understanding of the conflict are being forced into a closet, lest they be doxxed and shunned and exposed to violence. It is as though any dissenting viewpoint will not be tolerated. The well-honed arguments arguing for the compact theory of the Constitution have been relegated to the Memory Hole, and anyone who believes that a case can be made for it is subject to whatever punishment is necessary to shut him up or compel him to say that 2 + 2 = 5.
The people that sport "coexist" bumper stickers are operating under a different definition than what the word objectively means.
As for me, I have family on both sides. I was taught history at an Ohio school named for Abraham Lincoln. After decades of study, I believe that my Confederate ancestors were right. The USA was constituted as a Federal, not a National system. Many of the founders wanted a National system, but backed off and sold the Constitution as a Federal system - knowing that the American people would have rejected such a plan that would have reduced their states to provinces and given them a new incarnation of Parliament and George III. These arguments are laid out in the Federalist papers and the Antifederalist papers - which were at one time required reading in public schools. Even following the logic of the Federalists, the states had the right to secede, and the federal government aggressed against them when they invaded. President Buchanan did not invade South Carolina in 1860 or 1861. He understood that the Constitution gave him no authority to do so. President Lincoln, however, made violating the Constitution a routine practice.
Those who are intolerant of those of us who reject the Zinn/Foner historiography of American history should strive to be more tolerant. They should understand that while they have their opinion, it is an interpretation of the facts - and other decent people may disagree. America is a multi-ethnic society, and Southern heritage is part of that tapestry. Of the 50 stars on our flag, 13 of them are Confederate states that were annexed by the United States. And just as each state has its own history, and just as each ethnicity brings in its own story into the American experience, there is no one claim to what constitutes "American." We are all in this together, and we should all be encouraged to honor our heritage and be tolerant to others.
One could argue that it is not unreasonable for American Indians to wish to see statues to the Buffalo Soldiers removed - as these black US troops took part in the extermination of Indians. And similarly, black Americans could point to the fact that Indians owned slaves and even fought for the Confederacy - and determine that Indian statues should be torn down. Indians could argue for the removal of statues to Columbus, and white Americans could argue that Indians such as Chief Joseph, Geronimo, and Red Cloud were traitors who took up arms against the United States, and demand that their memorials be removed. Some of my ancestors fought against Indians in frontier wars - and those wars were not waged according to the Geneva Convention, with Indians scalping their white POWs. Would it be reasonable to hold them accountable to current rules of warfare? Would it be reasonable to be bitter against their descendants today? Moreover, Indians made war against other Indians. Black Africans enslaved each other and sold each other to Arabs and Europeans. Arabs enslaved a huge number of whites. And the history of Europe is a whole mess of wars and invasions between nationalities. How are we to iron it all out if we're looking for scapegoats to blame for our own problems, and grievances to collect for points in the victim-Olympics?
And is it reasonable to expect people from the past to live to modern standards? In our current culture, we consider slaughterhouses and steak restaurants to be normal, the way things have always been. But there are abolitionists who see the eating of meat as a profound evil. They are a small minority, and largely dismissed as kooks - but so were the American anti-slavery abolitionists at one time. What if a hundred years from now, the meat-is-murder argument becomes the dominant and legal view? What if the eating of meat is seen by our descendants as barbaric, and the slaughter of animals as cruel and immoral? Would it be wise to tear down statues of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks because they were not vegetarians? Would it be proper for our grandchildren to speak ill of us and be disgusted with us because we ate hamburgers? Should Abraham Lincoln's statues be torn down because he felt it should be illegal for blacks to intermarry with whites or serve on juries, and because he believed society should treat whites as superior? There has been at least one statue of Gandhi torn down because of his less than enlightened views on race. What do we expect of people who lived in past epochs?
Instead of celebrating how society has advanced, are we to ever simply destroy our own history with each change, setting fire to everything that came before us?
Of course, we Americans are typically a patriotic people. But is it possible to have an alternative point of view of history? What about people whose grandparents were vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is it unreasonable if they have a different perspective about the US in World War II? Would it be reasonable to tear down American WW2 monuments out of deference to Japanese-Americans who may be offended? And what about men like my grandfather who suffered in German POW camps in World War II? Would it be unreasonable for such men to not be fans of the German language and culture? Should we ban Oktoberfests for their sakes?
Every ethnicity has its share of legitimate beefs with other ethnicities. That said, I do believe everyone has the right to honor his own heritage as well as the responsibility to be tolerant of others - even if you disagree with it, and even if you are offended by it. This is especially true for brothers and sisters in Christ. For ultimately, our citizenship is in heaven, and our family transcends bloodlines. We should strive to avoid attacking the ancestry of others in the American tapestry. I don't expect other Americans to have any interest at all in the history of the Highland Scots. Why should they? Their lack of interest is not hatred toward my heritage. It would be strange indeed to compel non-Scottish children to learn Scottish-American history in school. Let families instill a sense of ethnic belonging in their children, and let the schools teach everyone to have a voice and celebrate his heritage no matter what it is. And we need more diversity when it comes to historiography.
How about we take the slogans about tolerance and coexistence and actually put them into practice?
Here is a postscript:
Tolerance, Part Two.
