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| Did the North sellout ex-black slaves? August, 2007 |
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| Did the South REALLY win the Civil War? |
An interview of William Blair, Director of the Richards Civil Era Center by Research/Penn State Magazine's David Pacchioli. Reproduced here with permission. See original article here.
Did the North really win the Civil War and end slavery? (Part 2)
Click here to go to part 1
Q: You hear sometimes that the average Southern soldier didn't care anything about slavery, he was fighting for his family...
A: ...Yes, for State's rights. For principle. Do you know the term "The Lost Cause?" The Lost Cause was the title of a book by Sir Walter Scott. The term was used deliberately by Southerners right after the war, by 1866. They started this interpretation that basically said, "We didn't fight for slavery, we fought against overwhelming odds for state's rights. By the way, we were never defeated, we were just ground down by superior force." That was the mythology that persisted, and still persists.
Q: One of the most interesting post-War figures, in terms of resisting the prevailing myth, is John Mosby of Virginia. Here's about as romantic a figure as you can imagine, this Southern cavalry legend, the "Grey Ghost"...
A: That's what makes history so wonderful to me. Mosby ends up becoming a Republican, criticizing a lot of former Confederates, saying that they're keeping the war alive instead of healing the country.
Q: He was saying things like, "Of course we were fighting for slavery."
A: If you go back and read the record, it's absolutely impossible to conclude otherwise. It takes a really active amnesia.
Q: And yet that amnesia has been pervasive for a long time.
A: You see signs of it loosening some. But I don't know if we'll ever win over the "moonlight and magnolias" theme.
Q: Would you say that the film Birth of a Nation was the perfect expression of that theme?
A: Absolutely right. It captures, in almost cartoon fashion, the romantic Southern view of the Civil War and Reconstruction that endured into the 1960s. And it was profoundly influential. Woodrow Wilson called it "history written with lightning." White audiences went to see it in droves.
The fact is there was a window right after the Civil War that saw one of the most marvelous experiments that we've had—the first bi-racial political coalition in this country. Within three years after the war, black males were full citizens with full political rights. Reconstruction is ugly, there's violence, there's failure, but there were also successes. In some respects it was the successes that black people had that brought down this horrible repression much later.
Q: Which wasn't really addressed until the early '60s...
A: A lot of people, myself included, consider that Civil Rights moment the second Reconstruction.
This is all at the heart, by the way, of the Richards Center. Whenever we interpret things, we look at the big picture. It only makes sense if you look at it in its entirety. There's a persistent struggle. In some respects our Civil War era goes into the 1960s.
Q: Does it continue even today? I'm thinking of controversies over things like flying the Confederate flag.
A: Confederate groups recently protested putting a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Richmond. It's historically accurate—Lincoln visited the city at the end of the war. But groups protested it.
You could be disheartened, you could say animosity still runs deep. On the other hand, we're finally having some discussions, and being forced to reassess the way we remember the Civil War. And if that means creating a much more inclusive history, one that really does tell the whole story, I think we're better off.
—David Pacchioli
William A. Blair, Ph.D., is associate professor of history and director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center; wab120@psu.edu. Blair's most recent book, "Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914," was published in 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press.
For more information about the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State and William Blair please visit the Research/Penn State Magazine Website at:
http://www.rps.psu.edu/inconversation/civilwar.html
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For more information about the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State and William Blair please visit the Research/Penn State Magazine Website at:
http://www.rps.psu.edu/inconversation/civilwar.html
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