An Open Letter to Confederate Sympathizers

Last month the KKK visited my county seat with hoods and recruitment signs. This message isn’t for them.

They felt welcome here due to my county’s fierce resistance to changing the names of two public schools that were named after Confederate leaders in the 1950s and 1960s (in the midst of desegregation). Resistance here comes from some county politicians, school alumni, and community members. This message is for them.

…AND for anyone who is fighting to keep any of the 1747 Confederate symbolic representations in public spaces (see Southern Poverty Law Center report).

Among the common arguments in my county is a fierce defense of the Confederacy. Here and here are some recent doozies:

•”[Robert E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson’s] involvement in the war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery.”

•”The war was not fought over slavery.”

•”The Civil War was fought to determine if a state had the right to break away from the country as a whole.”

•”[Stonewall Jackson] purchased two black teens he didn’t need because their mother asked him to buy them. He brought them to sit in church, in the pew with him, and was reprimanded by others who said they needed to sit in the balcony with the other black members of the congregation. His response? ‘My children sit with me.’ ”

Comments like these read thick with the Lost Cause narrative — a twisted interpretation of historical events that tells a false story that the Confederate cause was just, that the war was not about slavery, and that slavery wasn’t that bad. Assertions that folks who think otherwise need to learn history are a projectionist stance. Contemporary PhD-level historians have provided overwhelming evidence that the Confederates indeed went to war to defend the institution of slavery. Countless first-hand accounts of enslaved Africans (and common sense) tell us that slavery was abhorrent and immoral regardless of how “benevolent” any slave owner ever was. It’s a no-brainer that defending the institution of slavery is a white supremacists ideology. This is just not a debatable point among those who seriously study the war and are open to peer review. In fact, the idea that the Lost Cause narrative is myth is so mainstream now that you can learn about it on Wikipedia!

What’s tricky about the Lost Cause narrative is that factual historical information is misapplied to arrive at an inaccurate conclusion that flies in the face of heaps of evidence to the contrary. So, while the following arguments might hold historical truth…

•”Abraham Lincoln said, ‘If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.’ So those who say that the Civil War was ‘all about slavery’ are ignorant of what the ‘Great Emancipator’ himself said.”

•”[The Union] did not fight to free slaves…Who do you think bought that Southern cotton for their Northern textile mills, and who bought that sugar cane for their Northern Distilleries? New England mills alone consumed over 283 million pounds of slave-produced cotton, or 67% of the 422 million pounds of cotton used in U.S. mills in 1860.”

•“[Jackson] taught, for years, a Sunday School class for all the black people, slave or free, at the Lexington Presbyterian Church. He taught them to read (which was against the law) because he believed that it was every child of God’s right to read His word for his or herself, not via an interpreter only.”

…this does NOT therefore mean that Confederates were not defending slavery (they were) and that slavery was humane (it wasn’t). Historians DO understand that the Union did not go to war to end slavery; this is widely understood as well. The entire nation was complicit, north and south.

There is room for empathy.

I do not blame you for having heard, believed, and retold this narrative. Ever since the war ended, descendants of Confederates have been busy creating and perpetuating this narrative in an effort to save face. The United Daughters of the Confederacy in particular pushed a powerful and successful strategy to set the Lost Cause narrative into our national culture through targeting children: Children of the Confederacy chapters, stocking school libraries with Lost Cause narrative books, sponsoring lost cause essay contests and teacher scholarships, and campaigning for the UDC’s own approved school textbooks — many of which stayed in the school systems for decades. The residuals of these initiatives continued when you and I were attending school. We were taught the Lost Cause narrative, in part or in whole, as if it were objective truth. We were good students and learned what we were taught. I spent an embarrassingly large portion of my life holding the Lost Cause narrative interpretation as truth, when it never was. (By the way, did you hear that Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet, butterflies do NOT emerge from cocoons, and dinosaurs were not reptiles but pterodactyls were?) Amazing how what is “known” changes over time when we get more information.

I have compassion for you. You are my family after all. You are my grandfathers, uncles, aunts and grandmothers – we are cousins. You are my people.

I grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia where my father and his ancestors were born and raised. I was born a Carter and descend from the Northern Neck Carters, just like Robert E. Lee did. I am a descendant of a Confederate soldier. I’m no “come-here” Yankee, though I have traveled.

I suspect defenders of the Confederacy are also descendants of the Confederacy, especially when they display a depth of knowledge of the Lost Cause narrative as if it were learned directly from the Confederate Catechism.

Our history and heritage are painful to face. The Civil War was crushing for white southerners. A credible statistic estimates that 75% of southern white men (ages 17-50) fought for the Confederacy, and 36% of them were killed or maimed. My great-great-great grandfather was one of them. Land, homes, and wealth were destroyed. Indeed, that war was devastating for white southerners. There has been much to mourn; and perhaps that trauma has been passed down to us.

Please, I beg though, let us not forget that our African American friends and neighbors are humans, too, and they always have been. They have a deeply traumatic history directly at the hands of our ancestors. The knowledge that our ancestors were so deeply committed to white supremacy, enough to die for it, is another source of our pain. We might be more inclined to deny this truth than to face it.

When you say African Americans need to move on and leave race issues in the past, that’s another projectionist claim. It is us who needs to heal and stop hurting other people, and we can do that brave work.

I believe it is possible to both mourn our ancestors and honor the humanity of African Americans. Even the United Daughters of the Confederacy (see their home page) understands that Confederate imagery is often used to represent white supremacy, which is absolutely what happened when the bulk of public Confederate symbols were put in place during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. In my county, the two schools were named in the midst of desegregation resistance in 1959 and 1968. The UDC calls such use “abhorrent and reprehensible” and they “totally denounce” white supremacy.

We would all do well to follow the UDC’s lead on this particular stance and fully denounce white supremacy and the KKK and work diligently to remove Confederates symbols from public places.

 

—–

NOTE: Major portions of this letter were published as a letter to the editor of the Mechanicsville Local on August 28, 2019 (second letter).

EPILOGUE: My county’s chapter of NAACP has now filed a federal law suit to change the names of the two Confederate-named schools.

EPILOGUE 2: While the Hanover NAACP’s law suit was dismissed and they began an appeal process, the Hanover school board voted on July 14, 2020 to change the names of the schools.