Further TIDOS Heritage Month Activities

Loomis does some good work with Old Slow Trot, George Thomas. Thomas was, for all intents and purposes, written out of history because he didn’t conform to the post-reconstruction archetype of either a Union or Confederate general. A Southerner who decided to fight for the Union, Thomas’ career moreover demonstrates the absurdity of the “I did it for my state” defense of joining the Confederacy. Loomis further points us to some excellent TIDOS Heritage Month links from Old Hickory, a confirmed foe of Neo-Confederate revisionism.

Last, but not least, Erik gives an eloquent defense of the TIDOS History Month project. There seems to have been some confusion about the nature of this project in comments. We are not arguing that the South is inherently evil, or that the North has presented an admirable model of race relations. What we are arguing against is a particular historical interpretation that tries to create an equivalence between the United States and the Confederate States during the Civil War. This is not a dead or meaningless debate; nostalgia for the Confederate States of America continues to be widely held in the South and among certain presidential candidates. The mythology that has emerged around the Confederacy, and especially the “Lost Cause” is not simply a question of historical antiquarianism; such nostalgia invariably carries a racial component, and is deeply embedded within a narrative of hatred and oppression towards African-Americans. Confederate nostaligia has always included this racial component, and has never been about the “heritage” of the American South. The southern states have been part of the United States of America for 231 years, and were in rebellion for four; that leaves 227 years of potential heritage that don’t involve a brutal war fought in the service of human servitude. As others have noted, Confederate nostalgia is about the hate, not the heritage.

Undercutting every element of Confederate nostalgia, including the idea that men fought for their states and not their ideology, or that African-Americans fought in numbers for the Confederacy, or that the Confederate elite behaved with any honor, or that the Confederacy was even particularly popular among poor Southern whites, is a valuable project. As long as states see fit to have Confederate Heritage Month, it will be necessary to describe the essential perfidity of the Confederacy. In all honesty, I look forward to the day when Confederate nostalgia is every bit as respectable as fond remembrance for Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Imperial Japan.

A final bit on the treason aspect; it can hardly be ignored that the loudest cries of “Treason!” almost invariably come from those who would treat the Confederacy as an honorable cause. As such, emphazing that Jeff Davis, Bobby Lee, John C. Breckinridge, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and every other bastard who contributed to the death of nearly three quarters of a million Americans were guilty of the foulest treason imaginable against the United States of America. Against that example (as if it were necessary) criticizing the blundering ineptitude of the worst President since James Buchanan can only be understood as the most dedicate patriotism.

Massacre at Ft. Pillow

Today is the anniversary of the massacre of Union soldiers at Ft. Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864. Located in Jackson Henning, Tennessee, about 40 miles from Memphis, the fortress complex had been abandoned by the Confederate Army and occupied by 300 Tennessee cavalrymen and 300 Union troops. Of the latter, nearly all were African Americans newly recruited into a war that was now devoted to the destruction of slavery. The Confederate assault was led by Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a plantation owner and slave trader who would rise three years later to the rank of Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Outmatched by 2500 Confederate soldiers, the Union garrison — which had refused to surrender — was overrun within a matter of hours and suffered extraordinary casualties. After resistance had ended, Forrest’s troops shot, burned, tortured and mutiliated both living and dead. Acting Master William Ferguson of the U.S. Navy arrived to pick up survivors and to bury the dead. According to Ferguson’s written report of the event, delivered on April 14 to Major General Stephen Hurlbut,

[a]ll the wounded who had strength enough to speak agreed that after the fort was taken an indiscriminate slaughter of our troops was carried on by the enemy with a furious and vindictive savageness which was never equaled by the most merciless of the Indian tribes. Around on every side horrible testimony to the truth of this statement could be seen. Bodies with gaping wounds, some bayoneted through the eyes, some with skulls beaten through, others with hideous wounds as if their bowels had been ripped open with bowie-knives, plainly told that but little quarter was shown to our troops. Strewn from the fort to the river bank, in the ravines and hollows, behind logs and under the brush where they had crept for protection from the assassins who pursued them, we found bodies bayoneted, beaten, and shot to death, showing how cold-blooded and persistent was the slaughter of our unfortunate troops.

Of course, when a work is carried by assault there will always be more or less bloodshed, even when all resistance has ceased; but here there were unmistakable evidences of a massacre carried on long after any resistance could have been offered, with a cold-blooded barbarity and perseverance which nothing can palliate.

Forrest somehow managed to avoid prosecution for violating the laws of war. Indeed, he remains perhaps the most famous Tennesseeans of the 19th century. More than 30 monuments and state markers have been cast in his honor, including a statue at the state capitol building in Nashville. A state park bears his name, as did a World War II-era Army base in Tullahoma; the ROTC building at Middle Tennessee State University is named for the Klan leader and war criminal, as are two public high schools in the Volunteer State.