I have read His righteous sentence writ in burning rows of steel

[truepenny]

Over on Electrolite, a discussion has got going about the Civil War [American, that is. --Ed.] and how one ought to conceptualize it.

I am much too shy to jump into a discussion like that, but it's making me think.


I grew up in East Tennessee, although both my parents are of Yankee extraction (the ancestors involved in the Civil War were all on the Union side). East Tennessee wanted, at the time of the secession, to secede in reverse and become the Free State of Franklin, but, being surrounded by slave states, they couldn't pull it off. This fact is not taught in Tennessee History, a class which all seventh graders are required to take; I learned it from my mother, who was commenting on the sad facts that most people who live in E.Tenn. now are rabidly proud of their Confederate heritage.

I was certainly NOT taught in school that the Confederates were right; my high school history teachers were men with complicated relationships with the South and their own heritage. And although my high school was racist--more about that in a minute--it was not white supremacist. No swastikas that I recall, no skinheads. But a lot of Confederate flags on the pick-up trucks of teenage boys.

I had a long conversation once with a colleague in the department here (now teaching at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and I hope he's stirring up the hornets) about the racial divide in Southern high schools. He's African-American, and from Virginia, and what was interesting about that conversation was that our perception of racism in high school was essentially the same. The black kids and the white kids just didn't mix, except in certain narrowly defined arenas, like sports teams and chorus and band--arenas which also dissolved the class divide.

My high school was very weird in terms of class; somebody would have a fascinating sociology paper if they went and did some observing. The raison d'être of my hometown is the Oak Ridge National Labs, so the middle and upper classes tend to be scientists, or people who are part of the support apparatus for the scientists. The scientists come from all over, and their kids tend to be fairly urbane. The Asian, Hispanic, and otherwise neither Caucasian- nor African-descended kids tended to get lumped in there, although I don't know that all of their parents were scientists. (Oak Ridge did not, when I was in high school over ten years ago, have a noticeable Hispanic population; that may well have changed.)

Then there's what you might call the native population: the poor whites and the (mostly poor) blacks. So the class divide was triangulated: children of scientists and other cosmopolitanites, poor whites of Appalachian descent, and African-Americans. The three groups remained largely separated; I had friendships with members of both those other groups, but they were uneasy and awkward and not very close.

When I was in junior high, one of the very popular girls got removed from a particular position (president of Student Council? Homecoming Queen? she was the sort of girl it could have been either) because she was dating an African-American kid. I do think it is a tribute to the eroding effects of time that none of us students understood really what the fuss was about, but the administration was very sure. One of the most amazing things about moving to the Upper Midwest was--and still is--seeing what in my childhood were referred to ominously as "mixed-race couples" and not having anyone even blink.

So, yes, slavery was an abomination upon the face of the earth; there's a reason I know all the words to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," although it's slightly jingoistic nonsense and I know perfectly well that many of the causes of the Civil War were economic. I have neither patience nor sympathy nor tolerance for the whites who think they want the Confederacy to rise again. The violence and bloodshed and horror necessary for the South to admit that freedom equals Civil Rights appalls and shames me.

But one thing I do know is that Reconstruction didn't, and that a lot of the reason that people in the South wave their Confederate flags is not so much about slavery or race as it is about the myth that before the Civil War, the South was prosperous and powerful. I think a lot of people don't really think about the whole slavery part; what they know, remember, and believe is that the Yankees won the war, and that therefore Yankees are rich and Southerners are poor, and that the deep economic depression which is still hanging over the South like a storm front was caused by the South losing the Civil War. Never mind the fact that most of them would have been dirt poor in the Antebellum South. It's the dream that has power here.

Please note, I'm not saying any of that is true; what I'm saying is that the racial and economic problems have gotten conflated, and that as the years have passed, and the new status quo has been assimilated, the economic grievances are the ones that have come out on top. I'm also not saying that the white people of the South aren't racist, that this has become purely a matter of economic oppression, because boy howdy would that be a lie. But it is also true that I've seen more KKK activity in the seven years I've lived in the Upper Midwest than I ever saw in Tennessee. And that frightens me. (I also know, before scarcrest has to point it out, that that's partly a factor of living at the east end of the state rather than the west. But still.)

Driving through rural Tennessee can be an alarming experience--and not just because of the JESUS SAVES signs posted on random trees at the side of the road. The small towns are like ghost towns. The store fronts are half-empty and mostly haven't seen a facelift since the 30s, if then. The aftershocks of the Civil War haven't died down, either for African-Americans or for the communities of the mid-South--which were poorer than the Deep South states to begin with and which were the sites of many of the battles.

I think the thing that matters, and the thing that children need to be taught about, is the death. The sheer, stupid, brutal waste of human life. Despite the fact that Tennessee is littered with battlefields, I don't recall a single field trip to a Civil War site (Nice, politically-correct visit to Cherokee, North Carolina? Check. Shiloh? Say what now?) or any particular attention to that phase of Tennessee history. Which becomes the more appalling when you discover, as I just did (all praise the mighty power of Google!), that there was a battle for Knoxville--less than an hour away from the institutions of public education in which I was being taught. In fact, the hospital in which I was born, Fort Sanders, was named for the fort by which that battle is usually identified. I am completely serious; I did not know that until two minutes ago.

And that's just dumb. Because I think that's the place where maybe this long-festering, resentful, bigoted stupidity could be levered open. When I was a rising senior and doing college interviews, my parents and I stopped at Gettysburg, and I remember standing there, looking across that rather lumpy and uninspiring piece of terrain, and having it hit me. Hard. It wasn't just history; it was people dying. It was horrifying. And if a grumpy, miserable, and self-centered sixteen year old could get that (it was a bad trip, let's not get into the gory details), then maybe other people could, too. If they were given the chance.

Comments

[poisoninjest.livejournal.com]

Very cool post, and one that definitely rings true for me.

I learned it from my mother, who was commenting on the sad facts that most people who live in E.Tenn. now are rabidly proud of their Confederate heritage.

That's interesting... my dad's from East Tennessee, and while I haven't spent enough time there to know how the current residents feel about the Confederacy, I know that he always used it as a reason to feel superior to all those other, racist Southerners. ;o)

The black kids and the white kids just didn't mix, except in certain narrowly defined arenas, like sports teams and chorus and band--arenas which also dissolved the class divide.

That was my school-- the only one in the area that's 50/50 white/black, due to minority-to-majority bussing programs. Mostly poor rural redneck white kids and poor inner city black kids who were bussed in from as far as an hour away. It was a mess; you'd walk into any classroom and see all the white kids on one side of the room and all the black kids on the other. Except we didn't mix in activities, either; black students did basketball, white baseball. Black: cheerleading; white: color guard. Black: Future Business Leaders of America; white: Future Farmers of America. I was one of only two white kids in chorus. Band was probably the only exception to the rule, but there were even divisions there; the drum line was all black. Violence, on occasion, sprung up between the two groups, but for the most part we could have been operating in separate dimensions on the same campus.

a lot of the reason that people in the South wave their Confederate flags is not so much about slavery or race as it is about the myth that before the Civil War, the South was prosperous and powerful. I think a lot of people don't really think about the whole slavery part; what they know, remember, and believe is that the Yankees won the war, and that therefore Yankees are rich and Southerners are poor, and that the deep economic depression which is still hanging over the South like a storm front was caused by the South losing the Civil War. Never mind the fact that most of them would have been dirt poor in the Antebellum South. It's the dream that has power here.

Oh, yes, definitely. I remember an art piece on display at my college a few years back: crutches wrapped in Confederate flags, entitled "Excuses for Failure." I happen to be from a family that did pretty well before the war and lost a lot in it, and my mother and her family (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/097119131X/reviews/103-6462713-9174213#097119131x5000) were dirt-poor. They were lucky in that my grandmother raised them to believe that they had to live up to the standards of their ancestors in spite of their current situation, and all nine kids grew up to be educated and successful; but plenty of Southerners still harbor a lot of resentment over the idea that their circumstances might be better if not for the war. And, of course, plenty of people from elsewhere in the country and the world-- I've seen it while traveling and frequently online-- still harbor the assumption that everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is an ignorant, rascist Cracker, which just perpetuates resentment among Southerners and isolation from the rest of the country.

I've rambled. Shutting up now. *g*

[poisoninjest.livejournal.com]

editing myself:

everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is an ignorant, rascist Cracker

...and I'm not really helping the stereotype by misspelling "racist," am I? *g*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, good for your dad. :) All I know is that my mother is the only person I ever heard mention it, despite, as I said, compulsory "Tennessee Studies" in 7th grade.

I think the difference in our high schools may have had to do with the much larger black population in yours, so that there WERE things that they could stake out as their own. Also, our football team (which was what I was thinking of) was nigh unto God; if you were a guy who could play football, you DID. I can't offhand remember the racial mix of the cheerleaders or the dance team or the other sports teams--except I think the women's volleyball team had both black and white girls on it. But the black population was probably a fourth of the school, maybe less. If my yearbooks were anywhere I could get my hands on them easily, I'd check.

And you're right; the stereotyping of white Southerners doesn't help the whole muddle in the slightest. The fact that many white Southerners deserve the stereotype does not change the fact that it is a stereotype, or that, like other kinds of stereotyping, tends to make the group in question defensive and, as you say, resentful.

America. Land of the free, home of the fucked-up.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I've got to say, that in loos of the Law Library of the University of Oxford I once saw a very telling piece of graffiti (which, all things considered, would almost have to have been written by a US Rhodes scholar):

God bless America, home of the free
A land built on genocide and slavery.

Because from the outside I can see how damaging the whole thing must have been I am sorry for your pain.

My own home city - in the UK - which is Manchester wove cotton in the 19th century. And during the Civil War people starved in the streets because of the Yankee blockades of the Southern ports. But, largely, the people of England were anti-slavery. Even in Manchester. And a statue of Abraham Lincoln stands in one of our principal squares.

Civil Wars do not necessarily kill only those in one's own country, and people can die heroically for causes not their own.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

War is hideous. All wars. And their repercussions can just keep echoing and echoing, as the Irish would be the first to testify.

I think--and I'm appalled at myself even as I type this--that I know more about the English Civil War than I do about the American Civil War. I've taken a graduate seminar in English Civil War literature; I've written papers about Andrew Marvell and Richard Lovelace and John Milton; I've read The Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson and the pamphlets of Gerrard Winstanley. But that's all nice, safe, academic knowledge. Whereas the American Civil War ... English doesn't have a distinction, but it's the difference between savoir and connaître.

The American Civil War is an American cultural malaise. We get very stupid and impassioned about it, and I think if we could let go of the war and try to solve the problems left in its wake, we would ultimately be a lot better off.

But it's easier to be angry and resentful.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The English Civil War is over.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Ye-es. And then one assumes that because it is someone else's cultural malaise, it is for that measure irrelevant. Except that our own Civil War made an impact upon Ulster. And the impact that it made upon Ulster is still being fought out between our respective countries to this day. To the extent that to this day I am still expected to tell Americans (and well-educated ones at that) that, no: the heel of the British jackboot is not still upon Dublin (jackboots? Sheesh! Anyone everyone told you, O Boston, which sovereign state it was that, alone among the peoples of the Free West, sent its formal condolences to the Reichstag on Hitler's suicide?).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I said it all backwards. I do that a lot. *sigh*

What was I trying to say? I don't even know.

I think it was something about the American tendency to ignore the fact that other places have history, and that their history is affected by our history and vice versa. Many of the things that most infuriate me about American cultural thinking are directly descended from the Puritans who settled in New England, in large part because the Restoration had left them out in the cold. And, as you said, people in England were directly and vitally affected by the progress of the American Civil War. In other words, I think I was trying to apologize for the parochial short-sightedness of the post I made. And managed exactly the opposite. Go me. :(

I've never had a comparable experience wrt the English Civil War as I did at Gettysburg. Possibly that's because I've never been to England and therefore never stood on a relevant battlefield. What I was trying to say was that this does not make the English Civil War any less important or less relevant--Cromwell's policy in Ireland still has a lot to answer for--simply that it makes it more distant for me and therefore easier to think about in a detached fashion.

And I don't know what that point was supposed to be in support of, either. I just don't know. Take the fool away, gentlemen.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I'm not, to be fair, blaming you personally. But I am very conscious of the fact that IRA fundraising went on unopposed for many years on US territory, despite our diplomatic protests, while domestic terrorism wasn't an issue, and then September 11th happened, and then it still took two months or more for Irish republican terrorist organisations to be put on the list of proscribed organisations in the US, which rather lead me to feel that large quantities of people in the US actually don't care (in the sense of "mildly approve") of Irish terrorists blowing up kids on the British mainland.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Americans are stupid. Deeply, culturally STUPID. Everything that's happened in this country since the debacle of the 2000 elections proves that in spades.

And I'm sure there are Americans who don't particularly mind if Irish terrorists blow up children, just as there are Americans who never cared how women were treated under the Taleban--until it became politically expedient for us to have a reason to invade Afghanistan--Americans who don't care about the thousands of children dying of hunger in Africa and India, or the Hell's dance floor North American interference has made of South America. There were Americans who were DELIGHTED when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I've talked to one; in 1992, he still referred to the Japanese as "Japs." He told me that in Oak Ridge, when the news came of the bombings, they danced on the tennis courts all night long.

We're a big, stupid, short-sighted bully of a country. We could use our power for good, and we don't, and I hate it.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I saw the reference to The Civil War and was a trifle surprised at your glossing over Fairfax, Hampden and Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I went to high school in a suburb of Atlanta, and we actually had an (optional) semester course on the Civil War, which discussed all the causes and battles and such--but that might have been more due to having a teacher who'd specialized in the Civil War who happened to be available. The same thing in 8th grade--the school principal was a descendent of General Hood, and he gave a lecture on the Civil War in Georgia as part of the Georgia History class.

The city I lived in had been the site of a small battle, and more importantly, was in the big line of defense for Atlanta in the Civil War, so there was a lot of local history interest.

My high school was predominantly white--I think there were maybe 10% black kids (less, really), and fewer Asians than that, and I don't remember any Latinos, though now, I'm told, Latinos are a fast-growing part of the population. Anyway, as in your school, there wasn't much mixing. It wasn't until I went to college that I really experienced a lot of diversity.

I'm rambling...it was an odd feeling to visit the Civil War museum here in Philadelphia--it's just a house made over into a crowded, cluttered museum with lots of odd and souvenir-type artifacts--and have it slowly sink in that this was a UNION museum, which I'd never before experienced. Even though I'd never been a Confederate sympathizer, it gave me an odd feeling. (One cool thing--seeing posters to recruit free black men for the Union Army; they were directed to gather at Mother Bethel, a Methodist church I'd walked by a million times.)

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

Now that I think about it, my school experience in western N.C. was also remarkably CW-light until I hit 11th grade, AP U.S. History, and a teacher from Connecticut who referred constantly to the Confederate Army's inability to chew gum and walk at the same time. (I mean that literally. I sometimes wonder if he was testing to see whether any of us could be made into Confederate Pride types by sheer aggravation.) It's easy enough to sort out the political reasons why the (fine, U.S. ;) Civil War has become the sort of thing most people would rather look over or around or through than at these days, though. Too embarrassing, whichever side of the political tracks you hail from.

Battlefields make a strong impression on anyone with any emotional sensitivity whatsoever, and I agree that students should visit whatever's nearby. But I also think that high-schoolers should have to read Thomas Dixon's The Klansman (or at least watch Birth of a Nation) in an effort to figure out exactly how any white Southerner could get it through his or her head that black people (you know, the ones living in the same town, albeit in different neighborhoods) were dangerously animalistic while the War of Northern Aggression had damaged all that was pure and good and true about Our Nation. What's fascinating to me about The Klansman is that if you switched all the "Negro" references to "alien," it would work perfectly well as pulp Silver Age SF (alien invaders, rare helpful aliens, human collaborators, aliens menacing our women, the Last Alliance of humankind -- think about it). It's not the history, exactly, that's so dangerous; it's the myth built atop (and now almost inseparable from) the history.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's not the history, exactly, that's so dangerous; it's the myth built atop (and now almost inseparable from) the history.

Which says, in one sentence, what that entire meandering post was trying to get at. Thank you!

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Memphis, TN, attending Craigmont HS (class of '85), and we took Tennessee History in the 8th grade, as I recall. My teacher was a woman named Mrs. Josephine Hayslett, and my strongest memory of her is as a cranky middle-aged black woman who taught me more about the Civil War and the state of Tennessee than I ever dreamed I'd get out of that class. I'd bought into some of the popular-at-the-time bullshit portrayals of the War, and of the antebellum South, and it was a major shock to my 14-year-old self to have my world readjusted that way.

We learned about East Tennessee's independent urges, although Mrs. Hayslett put more emphasis on Tennessee being overrun before East Tennessee had a chance to organize and countersecede -- I remember there being a test question about why Tennessee wasn't included in Reconstruction. She put a lot of emphasis on the slave situation, but she also talked a lot about the economic background behind the war, and how the South was (for the most part) backward and poor, and how the planter aristocracy was so different from the rest of the region. We covered why some people actually would fight for their homes and neighbors, even though the cause was a wrong one, and how wars get fought for many reasons.

She mentioned strained relations between whites and blacks, and I saw it in my own family's history. My mother's people were from rural western TN/KY, and my father's family was from central Arkansas, and neither one of them grew up in close contact with black people. My father told me once when I asked that "black people just didn't stick around after dark" in the little town he grew up around in the '50s.

For myself, we actually had a "minority VP" position on the Student Council, although the SC didn't do anything besides congratulate itself. My high school had very strong race and class divisions -- I made waves because I was the first non-redneck white student to go into the ROTC program in years. We did have the band and the football team as mixed institutions, but we didn't socialize much between races.

We learned about the death, though. We learned about the battles, my Scout troop went to Shiloh every year, and my ROTC unit went as well. I remember standing in a field with markers showing where different units stood, and realizing what it must have been like to be there on that day. I remember taking off running for the "enemy lines", just to see how long it would have taken to cover the ground, and realizing that had I been doing that in 1862, I'd have been doing it with a heavy rifle and gear, and the enemy would have been shooting at me all the way. It was a long damn run, and it brought the nature of the combat in the Civil War home to me in a way that I've never forgotten.

I'm glad my Tennessee History class was better than yours. I'm also glad that you did discover the history, and what's behind it. We need to remember what has come before, so that we can try not to repeat those ghastly mistakes.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Your Tennessee history class sounds like it was way more fun--in the sense of not causing boredom-induced brain death--than anything I ever got on the subject.

I'm glad that somewhere in the state, somebody's been doing it right.