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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