America’s Confederacy Obsession
“I feel like something happened like 10 years ago where every, it’s like you have to think that every single person that who fought for the Confederate side was an evil person. I just think that’s so stupid.” – US Vice President JD Vance
JD Vance makes allowances for traitors.
The president renames American military bases for Confederate soldiers by proxy. Instead of directly renaming them, they have found valorous non-Confederate soldiers with the same last name as Confederate traitors and are ostensibly naming the bases after them. Meaning that they are really renaming them after Confederates on the not-so sly.
And yet people still argue that America isn’t racist, wallowing in perpetual, systemic racism.
Thanks to the “Lost Cause” mythology and America’s racist tendencies, the initial anger and hostility over the Civil War turned into a fawning adoration of the Confederacy that persists one hundred and sixty years later.
During Reconstruction, when Black southerners finally gained a measure of freedom, White southerners needed to change the narrative. They instituted Jim Crow laws to control and subjugate Blacks. But regaining control wasn’t enough. They needed to reframe the war so their actions would be viewed in a more sympathetic and forgiving light.
The ”Lost Cause” was born.
The Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, plus racist Southern historians, former Confederates and their sympathizers created a myth based on damnable lies.
They argued that the North started hostilities because it was afraid that the South had gained too much wealth and power.
They said slavery was a benign institution, slaves were treated well and loved by their masters.
They argued that slavery was a positive experience for Blacks because they lacked the mental capacity to be fully functioning members of society.
Slavery gave Blacks purpose and structure.
The Lost Cause ennobled and polished the Confederacy.
It portrayed the South and particularly plantation life as one filled with gentility and grandeur.
The plantation was a place where both slave and master were happy.
Plantations were places of great beauty and commerce.
Plantations were romanticized and pedestaled.
Confederates were fighting not to maintain a barbarous practice, but to preserve a better way of life.
The Confederates were fighting to preserve their homes and businesses.
They wanted to be free to pursue their virtuous existence – an existence that the North wanted to cruelly, jealously take away.
Over time, this mythology began to take root.
Monuments to the Confederacy began springing up all over the South.
Military bases were named after Confederates.
Margaret Mitchell wrote “Gone with the Wind,” which became the best-selling book in American history after the Bible.
Western movies and television shows made heroes of former Confederates.
During the Civil Rights movement, more Confederate monuments were built.
Southern states changed their state flags to versions of the Confederate “Stars and Bars” and “Blood-Stained Banner.”
To this day, the lies persist.
The Confederate myths and legends have been codified in the hearts and minds of every region in the country.
They see the antebellum South as a beautiful, romantic place.
They don’t see the cruelty and degradation of slavery.
The whippings and torture.
The raping.
The selling off of family members.
The Confederacy the revisionists portray is a land of milk, honey, and cotton where contented “darkies” loved their masters.
These rotten, festering lies remain deep at the core of the American psyche.
Accepting damnable lies makes it easier to cast Confederates as good people.
There is no discernible difference between rich plantation owners fighting to maintain slavery, or poor, stupid racists fighting to keep Black people disenfranchised.
The Confederacy was predicated on evil, birthed and conceived out of prejudice and inhumanity.
It was maintained by greed, cruelty, and lies.
It has been rehabilitated by White Supremacy.
It is bolstered by revisionist history and sheer ignorance.
How can one justify owning another human being?
How can one conceivably argue that anyone profiting from slavery, attempting to maintain slavery, or arguing the virtues of a system based on slavery is anything but evil?
Regardless of how Vance tried to speak well of enslavers,
Despite the idiocy of the “heritage, not hate” rabble,
No matter how many books are banned or how many lies are told,
The true history of the Confederacy has already been written.
A thousand monuments won’t change the facts.
The South of the enslaved,
The South of the plantation owner,
The South of crinoline dresses and regal ballrooms,
Built on the backs of the enslaved,
Is dead.
Perhaps it lies unburied, but it is still dead.
Good and dead.
And it is not coming back.
Ever.