All About the Heritage…

Yglesias calls out Saxby Chambliss for what seems like the 912th nostalgic reference to the Confederacy this year alone. Loomis has some appropriately caustic commentary on the subject. On the subject of Southern heritage, see also Sean Wilentz’ fine review of Nicholas Lemann’s Redemption, a history of Reconstruction that tends, incidentally, to undercut recent reevaluations of US Grant.

I sincerely hope that there will come a day when the display of a Confederate flag holds the same political meaning in the United States as the display of a swastika in Germany, and I also hope that, someday, positive invocation of any political or military leader of the Confederacy will be tantamount to political suicide. That time ain’t coming soon, though. As many (but not enough) know, Kentucky was a slave state but never joined the Confederacy. Kentucky supplied large numbers of troops to both sides, but by and large avoided serious battles on its terrain. In spite of the fact that Kentucky remained in the Union, the two statues standing outside the old courthouse in Lexington are Confederate officials, including John C. Breckinridge, Confederate Secretary of War. Some people think that these statues are harmless symbols; I don’t. I think that John C. Breckinridge was a traitor and a defender of slavery, and that there’s about as much justification for erecting a statue of him in Lexington as there is for putting up a statue of Stalin in Tblisi.

As I’ve argued before, the problem isn’t that the South is bad and evil, and that the North is good. The problem is that Southerners seem to have a remarkably difficult time getting past the five most shameful years of their history. “The South” has existed as a social and political community since before the Revolution, and yet invocations of Southern heritage are almost all made in reference to the five years of rebellion in defense of slavery. This obsession is deeply harmful, I think, to the maturation of the political identity of the South. It prevents an honest reconsideration of slavery, of Reconstruction, and of Jim Crow. Note this NYT article on a recently unearthed swimming pool in Mississippi. The pool was buried and closed in the mid-1970s because the white community preferred no public pool at all to an integrated one. Trying to bring up issues like this often evokes an almost turtle-like retreat into a Southern communal identity that rejects any criticism levelled by an outsider. The manifestation of this retreat is “Yeah, you think that all us Southerners are stupid and racist”. Again, it’s fair to say that some Northerners (and Westerners, and Europeans, and whomever else you’d care to mention) do have negative preconceptions about Southerners, but others of us just wish someone would tear down the damn statue of John C. Breckinridge.