I am sorry to see that a couple hundred dead-enders met in Montgomery, Alabama on Saturday to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis. I am sorry not because I object to grown-ups playing dress-up or even to people admiring aspects of the bravura Confederate spirit, but I do hate to see bad history promulgated as the truth. As Campbell Robertson reported in the Times:
“The Sons of the Confederacy’s principal message was that the Confederacy was a just exercise in self-determination that had been maligned by “the politically correct crowd” through years of historical distortions. It is the right of secession that they emphasize, not the cause, which they often describe as a complicated mix of tariff and tax disputes and Northern attempts to politically subjugate the South. . . .[S]lavery went unmentioned. Asked about the prominent speeches and documents that described the protection of slavery as the primary cause of secession, Joe Dupree of Mobile, Ala., said the question itself was wrong. “African slavery is a 4,000-year-old African institution that affected us a couple of hundred years,” he said. “It is, historically, an error.”
“Though the swearing-in was a re-enactment down to the antique buttons, there were contemporary political overtones. More than one speaker, insisting that “the South was indeed right,” extolled the Confederacy as an example of limited government that should be followed now, and said vaguely that the Southern cause was vindicated by a glance at the headlines every day. But even the politics on Saturday were tied up in a larger sense of grievance, a feeling of being marginalized and willfully misunderstood. Expressions of this feeling led to some rather unexpected analogies, like when Kelley Barrow, a teacher from Georgia, declared that people of Confederate heritage “have been forced to go to the back of the bus.””
I am very sorry these dedicated inheritors have studied the sources of their legacy so poorly. Would they do so, they would see that while the Confederate states did indeed claim the right to secede, none claimed to be seceding for states’ rights. In point of fact, when the idea of states’ rights was argued by Northern states seeking to ignore fugitive slave laws, Southern states strenuously objected. In South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession, specific mention is made of “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery”; of the Northern states’ failure to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by failing to return fugitive slaves to bondage; of New York’s forbidding “slavery transit” and New England allowing blacks to vote. Most of the other seceding states argued the slavery line as well.
It is also false that secession was caused by disagreements over tariffs and taxes. This is, I’m
afraid, a crock of shit. High tariffs were at the heart of the Nullification Crisis in the 1830s, but creased to be much of an issue thereafter. In 1857, tariffs were reduced to the lowest point since 1816, and the South’s representatives in Congress voted for the measure. Although the Confederate constitution largely copied the US Constitution, its authors made certain changes, most obviously about slavery and the rights of slaveholders. They made no changes about tariffs.
Finally, the Confederacy was hardly an example of limited government. For one thing, it approved the enslavement of a third of the population. Criticism of the government was punishable y death. And left to its own devices, it would have attempted the conquest of a slave holding empire in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
It is a sad thing that people feel “marginalized and willfully misunderstood.” But the Civil War has nothing to do with that.
On the up side, most of these geezers look pretty old. The report said that only a few hundred showed up. I’m guessing that by the bicentennial, they’ll be counted in the dozens.