This is a very thoughtful response to an issue that is difficult for
many people.  In thinking about this, we might remind ourselves that we
are not responsible for the deeds or misdeeds of our ancestors; we are
however, responsible for the history we retell and the way we confront
our past.  I think one of our nation's most difficult problems is that
we do not want to face the ugly parts of our past; we will reenact a
battle, which is fun, and educational, and enteraining, and even a good
physcial workout, but we don't want to think about why those people were
fighting or what they were fighting for.  We want to perpetuate myths of
that past, then get very upset when others challenge our myths and our
symbols.  This leads to a level of internal dishonesty; so that people
deny the history of secession and slavery to defend the use of a symbol
that stood for both.

To come full circle:  we go back to the original question about the
confederate flag as part of state flags.  It *was* added to protest
integration; and not people want to forget that history and claim it is
only the "Confederate battle flag" that is somehow disconnected to any
history except that of military campaigns. But, those military campaigns
had a political object -- destruction of the United States -- and a
social economic object -- the perpetuation of racially based slavery. To
deny this, is to deny our history and fail understand the legacy of both
eras -- the 1850s-1860s and the 1950s-1960s -- that we still live with.

I will drop out of this discussion, at least for a while, since I fear
any more postings will lead to my repeating myself.

Paul Finkelman

[log in to unmask] wrote:
> I've been mulling over the exchange of ideas with Professor
> Finkelman and others on this thread.  As Anne Pemberton
> points out, this originated with a request for help teaching
> a k-12 class in rural Virginia, and since I am concerned here
> with a different issue, I've changed the title of the tread.
>
> Fred Arthur Bailey has produced some terrific scholarship
> describing the ideological function of Confederate Heritage
> groups in the progressive era South, including a superb essay
> in the VMHB, on Virginia.  Part of what has motivated my
> recent posts is my sense that contemporary Confederate
> Heritage groups emphasize a moral and political vision that
> is radically different from that which Bailey describes.
>
> Surely none of us would wish to challenge the moral vision
> for which Professor Finkelman stands.  In the second half of
> the 20th century we have affirmed the moral vision of Abraham
> Lincoln, and repudiated the racist, slavery-as-positive good
> vision of men like John C. Calhoun or George Fitzhugh.
> Moreover, we surely wish to note that repudiation as
> something more than just the contingent operation of amoral
> historical forces--on the contrary, we hold today, as did
> Lincoln, that the Constitution protects all people in our
> country equally, by virtue of their common humanity, and that
> this is in a fundamental fashion right and just.  In
> affirming *this* vision of what the United States should be,
> we are making the moral statement that the US is a *better*
> place for it.  No nambly pambly relativism here.
>
> Moreover, as Professor Finkelman quite correctly points out,
> this moral judgement entails the condemnation of the social
> system of the Southern States prior to the Civil War.  It
> also entails the condemnation of the Confederacy, which, it
> seems quite clear to me and to almost every other
> contemporary historian who has looked into the matter, really
> was established to defend slavery.  Fifty years ago, when
> Confederate Heritage groups offered their construction of
> Southern history, they did so in opposition to this moral
> judgement.  They were very much in the same tradition as the
> groups that Bailey describes for the progressive era--that
> is, they defended Jim Crow, racism, segregation, and the
> various forms of paternalism descendant from the political
> vision of Calhoun and Fitzhugh.
>
> What I find intriguing is the possibility--what I think is
> the liklihood--that Confederate Heritage groups active today
> are NOT directly in the tradition which Bailey describes.  To
> my admittedly partial understanding, these modern Heritage
> groups represent a disjuncture with those of the first half
> of the 20th century.  As history, it strikes me that they get
> the big picture rather badly wrong.  They can do that,
> moreover, precisely because the older Heritage groups
> propounded a history of the Confederacy that minimized
> slavery itself as the cause of the war.  This creates a
> foundation for modern groups to offer an understanding of
> their past which stresses other qualities than race or
> racism.  As Southerners, and heirs to a region which was
> historically very much out of touch with the American values
> we rightly celebrate today, they face a difficult task--how
> do they create a positive identity out of the historical
> materials with which they have to work?
>
> As an historian, this places me in a difficult position.  I
> think it is cause for celebration that many Southern Heritage
> groups place themselves within the mainstream of American
> values, which is to say, defend the Constitution of Lincoln
> and not that of Calhoun.  This is a good thing, it seems to
> me--Southern whites don't seem to be constructing their past
> in order to defend slavery and its aftermath.  On the other
> hand, they are ignoring rather major portions of our history
> in order to do so.  They don't deny that slavery and Jim Crow
> happened, nor do they wish to bring those institutions back.
> But they certainly don't wish to remember or celebrate the
> role of their own ancestors in perpetuating those
> institutions either.
>
> The result is hardly an affirmation of, say, the KKK or the
> Arayan Nation.  It is rather a kind of effacement, a kind of
> willful forgetting, or at least an unwillingness, even in
> their historical imagination, to take responsibility for the
> evils of the past.  I don't think we can necessarily ask
> Heritage groups to take responsibility for past evils--but
> that surely is an important role of academic history.  I
> don't hate America, and neither of course does Professor
> Finkelman, or any of the other contributors here.  We think
> that it is important, as historians, that America and
> Americans "own" its past, including the awful things that
> Americans did, to each other and others, in the past.
>
> Without some sort of positive or constructive identity to
> offer, heritage groups of any sort will not survive. I am
> glad that southern Heritage groups seem to be offering a
> positive vision that is not at its core racist.  I am
> distressed, however, at the Public history which results.
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> James Madison University
>
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--
Paul Finkelman
Chapman Distinguished Professor
University of Tulsa College of Law
3120 East 4th Place
Tulsa, Oklahoma  74104-2499

918-631-3706 (office)
918-631-2194 (fax)

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