Honoring the Confederacy: Is it inherently racist?

Anyone with a high school education knows that “slavery was the central cause of the Civil War,” said USA Today in an editorial. So why did that come as news to Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell? McDonnell, a rising GOP star, stunned the political world last week by declaring April “Confederate History Month,” and urging “all Virginians” to “reflect upon … and understand the sacrifices” of those who fought on the losing side of the Civil War. The proclamation was a sop to a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which says the war was fought by their ancestors for “the preservation of liberty and freedom.” Sure it was—“the freedom to own slaves.” Somehow, McDonnell forgot to mention slavery in honoring the Confederacy. When an uproar ensued, said Andrés Martinez in The Washington Post, the governor amended his proclamation with a clause calling slavery “an evil and inhumane practice.” But why is McDonnell glorifying the Confederacy at all? Let’s not pretend that “both sides were in the right.”

McDonnell should not have backed down, said Patrick Buchanan in HumanEvents.com. Virginia was not part of the original Confederacy, nor did it secede in defense of slavery. Virginia left the Union only after President Lincoln demanded that its state militia join in crushing fellow Southerners who had already seceded. Virginians fought, in other words, not to preserve slavery but to “rid themselves of a government to which they no longer felt allegiance.” Victors write the history books, said Dave Gibson in Examiner.com, so Abraham Lincoln is viewed as a hero, when, in fact, he came closer to tyranny than any other president. Lincoln suspended parts of the Constitution, arrested political opponents, and closed down newspapers. He made it clear that the war was not about ending slavery but about “the federal government exerting complete control over all citizens.” That’s why the South rose up against him.

Fine, let’s talk history, said Jon Meacham in The New York Times. During Reconstruction in the 1880s, the Ku Klux Klan era of the early 1900s, and in the civil-rights era of the 1950s, there was a similar upwelling of Southern nostalgia for the Confederacy; it always seems to happen in times of “racial and social stress.” Today, Barack Obama is serving as America’s first black president, and huge swaths of the South are “anxious and angry about the president, health-care reform, and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary.” Hence, the transparent effort by some on the Right to rebrand the Civil War as “an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.” Our nation’s darkest moment and greatest shame—in which 600,000 people died—has become “fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base.”

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It’s not quite so simple as that, said David Kuhn in RealClearPolitics.com. White Southerners understandably “bristle” at the idea that all Confederate soldiers were villains who fought to keep blacks in slavery; in reality, very few of them held slaves, and many fought battles to protect the land on which they were raised. But the Confederacy “cannot be divorced from its consequence,” and if the South had won, blacks would have remained property. McDonnell has done neither himself nor his fellow conservatives any favors, because we are constantly having to defend ourselves from “unsubstantiated charges of racism”—especially now that the Democratic president happens to be black. Thanks to McDonnell’s deeply insensitive gaffe, our ideological opponents now have fresh ammunition.