The War for Southern Independence (continued):  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

​
**Searching for Lincoln (2015) cannot be praised too highly.  It is a compendium of suppressed truth that the world has long been waiting for, skillfully produced and perfectly on target.   It takes as its mission the correction of the multiple falsehoods of “what everybody knows” about Honest Abe and his role in history. There is a temperate, pictorial, and hard-hitting review of the real as opposed to the fantasy Lincoln in such matters as race, slavery, the Constitution, economic motives, war on civilians, POWs, and much else.   Perhaps the greatest points of emphasis are two neglected truths: 1) Lincoln did not wage war to save the Union or the Constitution.  He waged war to preserve government power.   2) He is responsible for the dangerously unlimited regime under which we suffer today.  Until Americans understand that and free themselves from Lincoln worship we will continue in subjection.


**Searching for Lincoln is almost entirely a Northern production, created by Eugene and Dete McGowan. Well-known Southern defenders participated in the creation, including Professor Thomas DiLorenzo and the brave doyenne of Copperheads, Mrs. Valerie Protopapas of New York. Get a copy for your children and grandchildren and anyone else you know who is suffering through a current educational institution at any level. Perfect Christmas presents for friends and relatives.

 (T)Field of Lost Shoes (2015).  I have written a good bit about the treatment of the South in film. A new entry into that dubious field is the recent Field of Lost Shoes. It purports to tell the story of the Virginia Military Institute cadets who at great sacrifice participated in driving back the invading Yankee arsonists and vandals at the Battle of New Market in 1864.  It does enact this bit of history, sort of, after a fashion.


In 96 minutes, including a half hour of battle action, you will not be offended by even a faint glimpse of a (shudder!) Confederate flag.  (This horrid object is apparently now banned entirely from V.M.I., even in commemorations of New Market.)  The first 10 minutes are devoted to a slave auction in which brutal Southerners break up a family—quite unlikely in Lexington, Virginia, in 1864. We see a flashback of this as the cadets march toward battle, reminding us that, after all, they were fighting against noble opponents who wanted only to free the slaves.


At midpoint we have a severe beating given to an intelligent, kindly slave for something he did not do.  We see Lincoln morally offended that the Confederates are sending “boys to be massacred.”  But this is absurd.  There were plenty of soldiers in both armies as young as were the cadets. Besides, Lincoln inaugurated the bloodshed, although he doubtless did not anticipate the great volume that followed, and he could have avoided it or stopped it at any moment if he had been willing to give up the benefits the war brought to his political party and to Northern Big Money men. (At least in this one, Lincoln is correctly ugly, does not look like a movie star.)

The civilian population of Virginia seems to be fat and prosperous and suffering no privations in 1864 although their region had been repeatedly sacked and looted by Yankee soldiers.  V.M.I.’s first Jewish cadet, Moses Ezekiel, later to become one of America’s greatest sculptors, is portrayed as being doubtful about the Confederate cause. There is no evidence that he was ever anything other than a loyal Southerner. I suppose it was thought that since he was Jewish he had to be a “Liberal.”

Grandmother always said that when you have to critisise you should add something nice if you can:  There is a good and sympathetic portrayal of John C. Breckinridge by the Brit actor Jason Isaacs. The characters actually talk like Southerners and some of the time even act like Southerners.  The battle scene is vivid, although not very accurate, I think.

It could have been worse, I suppose, but with a little honesty it could have been much better.

Here are some films that mainly concern the North, but are worthwhile because they have some realism in their treatment of the dangerous myth of the righteous Union cause.


**Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988).  Most film portrayals of Lincoln are hagiographic fantasies (the worst example being (X) Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda).  This presentation, though sympathetic, is realistic about the shrewd politician Lincoln (Sam Waterston).  It presents a fairly candid view of Lincoln’s character, of his unstable wife, his devious associates, his loser son Robert, and the seamier side of wartime Washington.


My take on Spielberg’s celebrated (X)Lincoln will appear in a later chapter.

**The Andersonville Trial (1971). This is a dramatisation of the 1865 military trial and condemnation of Captain Henry Wirz, commander of the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia.  Richard Basehart plays Wirz effectively.  The film is tinged with Northern righteousness but manages to show some of the moral ambiguity, propaganda lies, and perjured testimony which characterised the acts of the Radical Republicans who ruled at the time.

**The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) shows the ruthless imprisonment of Dr. Samuel Mudd of Maryland, an honourable man who was guilty of treating Booth’s injuries.

(T) Gangs of New York (2002).  My analysis of this award-winning Scorsese blockbuster appears in a later chapter.

(X) The Conspirator (2010) about the trial and execution of Mary Surratt as an alleged Lincoln assassination conspirator.  This film whitewashes the brutality and illegality of her imprisonment and trial and the anti-Catholicism and paranoia of the Radical Republicans who executed her.  There is even a suggestion that Mrs. Surratt might not have been hanged if her son had not escaped.  What kind of people nonchalantly kill the mother because they can’t catch the son?


(T) Copperhead (2013).  Ron Maxwell’s rendering of Harold Frederic’s 1893 novel about persecution of an antiwar family in upstate New York Lincolnite territory.


WHAT COULD BE:  A truthful life of Bedford Forrest would be a great contribution to American history and refute a lot of conventional lies.  Any number of events in Forrest’s career would make a great movie:  Brice’s Crossroads, an honest presentation of Fort Pillow, the epic recounted in Donald Davidson’s poem “The Running of Streight,” and many others. 

A life of Jefferson Davis would make a marvelous three-part series:  up to the point of his being elected President; the War; and his imprisonment and postwar life.  This would be a very American work.  Mrs. Varina Howell Davis is one of the most remarkable women in American history—intelligent, hard working, brave, loyal, and participant in a long span of American history.  Compared to Mary Todd Lincoln, who was unstable, insanely jealous, embezzled White House funds, and ended her life in an asylum.  A biopic of Varina would be marvellous, right up to her passing away as an honoured citizen of New York.  (I pray regularly to my Maker that nobody makes a film out of the recent awful book Varina by the scalawag writer Charles Fraser).  A film about the Davises could be realistic, not like the fantasies which must be concocted about the Lincolns.


Jeb Stuart is an intrinsically interesting character.  The epic voyages of Raphael Semmes, one of the most interesting characters of the time, would be a natural.  Any one of the 100 events in James R. Kennedy’s Uncle Seth Fought the Yankees would make a popular flick.


EXECRABLES:   Evil Confederates appear in a great many movies recently.  Often they are vicious killers of women and children.  The ignorance and malice of those who are responsible for these films is unforgivable.  How to explain?  They think it will sell, but most importantly we have here the well-recognised phenomenon of bad people projecting their own sins onto others. Yankee atrocities against Southern civilians are as heavily documented as anything in history and were indeed official policy, but nothing remotely similar can be found on the Confederate side.
 
Here are some WBTS losers to avoid at all costs:

(X) Cold Mountain, based on the scalawag novel that misrepresents Western North Carolina in the War between the States and serves no purpose except to assure Yankees that Confederates were not only evil but stupid.  The movie incorporates every hackneyed cliché about Southern white people:  rapists, incestuous, murderous, treacherous, ignorant, dimwitted, hypocritical, etc.  The novelist Charles Fraser has discovered the key to the bank—trash the homefolks and cater to the outsiders’ hostile beliefs.  One fears that some people actually believe this driveling parody of history.   


(X) The Beguiled, some viewers find this Clint Eastwood vehicle interesting from the psychological viewpoint, but it looks to me more like a Yankee fantasy about loose Southern women.                                              

(X) The Horse Soldiers:  This John Wayne adventure tale seems to be popular, but it incorporates every anti-Southern idea in the catalog.  There are an insipid Southern belle, vicious rednecks, and stupid Confederates who lose every battle.  It is about a heroic Yankee cavalry raid in the South—false in its premise because most such raids were designed to rob and terrorise civilians and were usually thwarted by Forrest or other Southern cavalrymen and had to retreat to their base.  It also shows Yankee benevolence toward Black people, which anyone who knows anything about the behaviour of Northern soldiers can only find unbelievable.  Worst of all, it tacks on a fictional misplacement of the story of the Virginia Military Institute cadets at New Market and uses that for some comic relief. Directed by John Ford, who was in his 70s and said to be dissatisfied with the film.   

(X )Last Stand at Saber River.   Tom Selleck is a Confederate soldier who returns home and is harassed by bad Yankees.  Could have been a good and true story.  But wait a minute.  It seems he has deserted because of the evil Gen. Forrest’s brutal massacre of unarmed prisoners at Fort Pillow (which, of course, is not true) and he is also harassed by a crazy Confederate who wants to continue the war, a man who incidentally kills women and kidnaps children.  This vileness is based on a story by the Hollywood crime writer Elmore Leonard, who knows less about The War than my neighbour’s cat.


(X) The Run of the Arrow with Rod Steiger as a mean and unlikely Confederate.

(X) Operator 13:  The fair Marion Davies as a mulatto Union spy.         

(X) The Last Outlaw, with Mickey Rourke, nonsense.

(X) Alvarez Kelly, which turns the dashing cattle raid of Confederate cavalry on Grant’s supplies into a vicious personal vendetta. 

(X) Journey to Shiloh which seems to have no purpose except to show how bad Confederates were.    

(X) A Time for Killing also known as (X) The Long Ride Home (not the Randy Travis version), Confederate rapists and murderers.

(X) North and South, trashy John Jakes pseudo-historical fiction made into trashy TV series. 

(X) Mosby’s Marauders, a weak unreal TV series—besides Mosby’s men were not marauders. The Yankees were.                                                              

(X)Saddle the Wind, silly.                                                                              

(X) Sommersby (1993), Jodie Foster and Richard Gere in a pointless rip-off of the French classic The Return of Martin Guerre. 

Ignorance and malevolence are evident in recent online ads for some Confederate films, written by people with no knowledge but with pre-programmed assumptions.   The Southern chivalry displayed in **Rocky Mountain becomes “Rebels use a Yankee bride to lure Union troops into Indian country.”   The official notice of (X)Alvarez Kelly describes Gen. Tom Rosser, leader of the splendid Confederate cattle raid, as a “brutal Southern officer.”  This for a man who was in business in Minnesota just after the war, was a U.S. consul in Canada, and served the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. I wonder if people in Minnesota thought he was a sadist?  The flick Way Down South is described as about “segregation” in antebellum Louisiana.  Now Louisiana had slavery before the war but it did not have “segregation” until fifty years later.  Segregation was invented by Yankees who were repulsed at the everyday intimacy of black and white people in the South.


Despite occasional good spots, we all know that Hollywood now has Confederates slated most of the time to be unrelievedly evil.  I saw a feminist revenge flick, which shall remain nameless here, that opens with Confederate soldiers attacking a town, directing artillery against a church full of civilians, killing women, and shooting little children in the back.  Let us say that this scenario is not only untrue but is a complete reversal of the truth.  These are things the boys in blue might do, not our people.  Do I sense that familiar psychological phenomenon of “projection” at work - blaming others for our own sins?


The worst thing about Hollywood’s hatred of the South is it deprives not only Southerners but all Americans of our history and renders our forebears into alien and dead abstractions. There is yet another evil product—the sense of righteousness which has been an American problem since the first Puritans sailed into Massachusetts Bay.  If Sherman burning his way through Georgia and South Carolina was a holy exercise against evil, then obviously dropping bombs and missiles on women and children two thousand miles away who have done us no harm is OK. 


And what to say about the two television films from which most Americans seem to have gotten their knowledge about the War Between the States?  (X) Roots:  a fantasy which dissolves when you understand that black slavery was invented and sustained by Africans and that transfer to the South was a net gain for Africans and their descendants.  (T) Ken Burns’s The Civil War:  A wealth of intrinsically interesting material carefully crafted by a biased agenda of presentistic propaganda. 

(X)Roots and Ken Burns are likely to show the way to what we can expect from now on in popular media portrayals. It is a strange and unsettling feeling for an aware Southerner to know that he and his are the objects of hatred and lies from fellow citizens who he has never harmed and toward whom he has never intended any harm. But for the most part, Southerners do not even notice. We are an easy-going and tolerant Christian people and do not go out of our way to search out and deplore what other people are up to. Besides, as the late Tom Landess once observed, Southerners are so used to abuse that, like an old injury, we hardly notice it.

Interestingly, one of the major Northern characters in Gettysburg is played by a Southerner—Texan Sam Elliott as John Buford (not entirely off since Buford was from Kentucky and had a cousin who was a Confederate general). Even more peculiar, Johnny Cash is cast as John Brown in (X)The North and the South miniseries and Texan Rip Torn plays U.S. Grant in the miniseries (T)The Blue and the Gray. Think about it. I suspect it is because it is Southerners who best convey the persona of Old Americans and that movie creators gravitate to this unconsciously.

Ronald Maxwell’s Civil War films are achievements for the ages. They are a  glorious and courageous homage to real American history.  They show that at least one American filmmaker is still capable of creating an epic and still has an authentic respect for the American past. (I understand that Maxwell has sought to raise funding for the final film of his War between the States venture, to be called “The Last Full Measure,” but has so far been unsuccessful.)


**Gettysburg  (1993).  It is interesting that Confederates get a bit more screen time and the main Confederate characters are highlighted while the only featured Union characters are (Southern-born) Sam Elliott as Brig. Gen. John Buford (also Southern), and Jeff Daniels as a well-played Col. Joshua Chamberlain. Chicagoan Tom Berenger’s Longstreet is about as good as can be hoped for.  After many viewings and the passage of time I do see a few weaknesses in Gettysburg. These are due to the script following the Shaara  novel The Killer Angels as a source rather than actual history. Important parts of the battle are overlooked but that is probably unavoidable from time limits. While Pickett was not the brightest star in the galaxy, I don’t think he was as great a buffoon as he is played. Some of the conversations do not ring true, although I grant they provide useful information that otherwise could not be worked in. I don’t care for the bit of Yankee superiority where the Irish immigrant makes fun of the speech of  Southern soldiers whose grandfathers founded the U.S. As the biographer of General Pettigrew, I can assure you that the scene in which he offers Longstreet a copy of his book before the great charge is very implausible. The film could have used more genuine rousing Southern music to portray the Confederate spirit.


Get the tar and feathers ready, boys. Here goes:  I know that Martin Sheen is rightly disliked for his personal politics, but allowing that no one living can possibly represent Lee, I think he does not do too bad a job, much better than Robert Duvall’s Lee in Gods and Generals.  Sheen’s Lee is believable  as a deeply moral and great man.


**Gods and Generals  (2003).  This is somewhat more satisfying of Maxwell’s two, in my always humble opinion, because it covers more time and has a remarkable portrayal of Stonewall Jackson as a man and a great leader.  The New Yorker Stephen Lang does well in the part.  It also illustrates Yankee atrocities and makes clear that Southern soldiers are defending their homeland.  The music is good.  It would have been well to show more of Jackson at his height in the Valley campaign, but only so much can be done in a few hours.  As I said above, I don’t think Robert Duvall is successful as Lee, although he is a great actor of Southern demeanour who has played many parts superbly.  In 1861 Lee was a man  in vigourous late middle age with a daring military genius lurking just below the surface. Duvall, in my opinion, makes him too old and has the wrong accent. Duvall is too redneck to be Robert E. Lee, as pleasing as it is to have him aboard.  


While Yankee atrocities against civilians are shown there is one misleading  note. A Fredericksburg family has their black maid claim that the house is hers on the theory that the Yankees would therefore not loot it. This is pure phony Yankee righteousness. Anyone who has looked closely at the behaviour of Yankee soldiers in the South knows that they were more likely, not less likely, to abuse and rob black people than white.  Black people had less hope of an effective protest. 

**The Littlest Rebel  (1935). Who can possibly forget “America’s sweetheart” Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in this pleasant bit of Americana. Of course, there is the obligatory falsely benevolent Lincoln.


**Hunter’s Raid:  The Battle of Lynchburg  (2010).  This  is an excellent  docudrama, independently and locally created by the Historic Sandusky  Foundation of Virginia. It portrays the massive Union raid of 1864 and its defeat by the old men and boys of Virginia. Remarkable and ought to be imitated all over the South. The subtitle is “Defending Hearth & Home.”

**Rocky Mountain (1950). A rare and moving Hollywood treatment of Confederate chivalry.  Errol Flynn leads a small party of Southern soldiers on a mission in the California outback.  In the end they die fighting defending Northern women from hostile redskins.  The last scene shows a  Northern officer raising a Confederate flag on a mountaintop in honour of  these heroic  Southern men. It is said that Ronald Reagan wanted Flynn’s role.

**Ride with the Devil  (1999). A compelling and realistic picture of Yankee depredations in Missouri during the War Between the States and the Southern resistance. It is faithfully based on the novel Woe to the Living  by  Arkansas novelist Daniel Woodrell who also wrote the book on which the  acclaimed Winter’s Bone was based.  The Northern stars Tobey Maguire, Jewel, and Jeffrey Wright and the Brit Jonathan Rhys-Myers seem to have no trouble playing Confederates. The film was created by the Chinese director Ang Lee, with a remarkable freedom from the usual Yankee righteousness.

**The Outlaw Josey Wales  (1976). Clint Eastwood is a Southern survivor of Yankee ethnic cleansing in western Missouri.  Like many such he heads to Texas to start a new life on the frontier. Based on a book by Asa Earl Carter, a speechwriter for Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama. Carter also wrote the “Native American classic” The Education of Little Tree.

(T) Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958). Clint Eastwood had one of his most substantial early roles as a Confederate.

**Drums in the Deep South  (1950). An OK war movie with good guy Confederates.

**The Guns of Fort Petticoat  (1957). Inspiring and well-told story of women, their men folk all away fighting for Dixie, organising and countering a big Indian attack.

**Pharaoh’s Army  (1995). The realistic experiences of a Kentucky mother and son after Yankees take over their homestead. 

(T) Ironclads (1991). A pretty good presentation of the historic battle between the Virginia and the Monitor in 1862 and of the Confederate Navy hero Catesby Jones. Alas, you have to wade through a lot of unreal Hollywood stuff about a female spy, romance, slavery, etc. to get to the battle.

**The Rose and the Jackal  (1990).  An interesting though fictionalised  account of the Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow as prisoner of the Yankees. Good on the darkness of Yankee-occupied Washington. 

​**The Field of Lost Shoes  (2014). My take on this film will appear in a later chapter.

**Firetrail  and  **The Last Confederate: Here are two excellent films that are surprisingly  recent.  These are largely the product of regional inspiration and regional talent on both sides of the camera and reflect genuine regional memory, a thing rare in America and even rarer in cinema. As renderings of historical experience they are faithful and subtly artistic. Costume, action, dialogue, and personalities carry conviction as a representation of the real experiences of real Americans in the horrors  of  Sherman’s  terrorist  campaign against  Southern  civilians.  Contemporary manners-challenged viewers might find the dialogue in Firetrail and The Last Confederate a little slow and stilted, but it captures truly the times and the people portrayed. In those days they understood what George Garrett has written: that manners are a recognition that our fellow human creatures, all of them, are made in the image of God.


**Firetrail (2007).  This gem about South Carolina during Sherman’s criminal campaign has accurately been called “superbly directed” and “genuine and authentic.”  It is amazing that this vivid and truthful re-creation of history could be produced these days.  The little-known Southern actors, men and women, are wonderfully true.  A must see.  WARNING: a shortened version of Firetrail  was marketed in 2014.  This version is so hacked up it is not worth your time.



**The Last Confederate (2005).  Like the preceding item, this film seems to have been largely made by Southerners.  It is another great truthful  retelling of South Carolina during Sherman’s  March.  This and Firetrail come as close as is possible to showing the real experience  of Southern  soldiers and civilians.  Both are well-told and with appealing characters.   Amazing  achievements for this day and time. 

**So Red the Rose (1935).  A Mississippi plantation family in the war, based on the Stark Young novel. This film is admired by many Southerners.  It has many fine scenes. Randolph Scott is very good. The cast, mostly non-Southern, tries a little too hard on the accents.  Sometimes, in my opinion, it gets a little too precious in its portrayal of plantation life, although sound on The War. A major flaw is the plantation master played by a comic actor as almost a drunken buffoon. I suppose the creators of the film thought they needed some supposed humour.


**The Hunley (1999).  A pretty good rendering of the story of the innovative, heroic, and tragic Confederate submersible that tried to break the blockade at Charleston.  The only bad aspect is a truly ridiculous mis-portrayal of General Beauregard by the Canadian Donald Sutherland. He actually did not bother to learn anything about Beauregard before acting the role.


**Hangman’s Knot (1952).  A party of Confederates faces a dilemma when they realise they have seized a Yankee gold shipment not knowing the war was over.  They are, of course, honourable men, and led by Randolph Scott,  try to do the right thing.  In the process they fight bad Yankees and protect good ones.

**The Angel of Marye’s Heights  (2010).  A good treatment of Confederate soldier Richard Kirkland, who risked his life to tend Yankee wounded on the battlefield of Fredericksburg. According to the jacket he is an “American” hero. Strange, I have never heard of any “American”  Yankee doing anything comparable. Especially good because it shows Kirkland’s  family and background, giving a true idea of who Confederate soldiers were.

**Great Day in the Morning  (1956).  Southern miners in  Colorado outwit  the Yankees and get their silver to the Confederacy.

(T) The Last Outpost , aka Cavalry Command  (1951).  Ronald Reagan, a second-string Hollywood actor of whom you may have heard, wears the gray and leads brave and honourable Confederates, flags flying, to the rescue.

(T) The Undefeated  (1969)  A mildly interesting account of Union and Confederate soldiers getting together to fight Mexicans at the end of the war—if you can stand “Rock Hudson” as a Confederate.

(T) Two Flags West  (1950). Another one about Confederate POWs helping  the Union fight Indians in the West.

**The Gray Ghost  (1957). A one season TV series about Col. John S. Mosby. Bold, smart, and honourable  Confederates. Too bad there are not more episodes.

(T) The Blue and the Gray  (1982). Somewhat watchable miniseries that  makes an effort to be even-handed.

(T) The Eagle and the Hawk (1950). Confederate John Payne helps Mexicans against the French invaders.

(T) Escape from Fort Bravo (1953) and (T) Major Dundee (1965).  Sometimes interesting  accounts of Confederate POWs in imaginary far West prison camps.
More discussion of War for Southern Independence films will appear in the next several chapters.

Symbols Used

** ​Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films.  The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion.

(T)   Tolerable but not among the most highly recommended

(X)   Execrable.  Avoid at all costs

​NOTE:  Most of the research for this book was done in the age of the DVD.  “Streaming” is now becoming dominant.  There should be no difficulty in finding the recommended films in that medium.

This piece was originally published in 2019.

​If Amistad is not yet a household word like ET or Jurassic Park, it soon will be with the power of Steven Spielberg behind it.  (When I started this review awhile back, that was my first sentence, but I may have been wrong.  Late reports indicate the box office is lagging.) 


Amistad is really two movies. One, about the 19th century slave commerce between West Africa and Latin America, is a good piece of film-making. The other, about American politics and law, is completely hokey and misleading.


Nobody knows for sure, but from the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s between11 and 15 million black Africans were transported to the New World, a vast undeveloped region with a voracious appetite for unskilled labour.  Every maritime nation in Europe participated in this trade. Only about five to six percent of the Africans ended up in North America, the vast majority going to South America and the Caribbean.  By the time of the Amistad incident, 1839, the market was largely limited to Cuba, a Spanish colony, and Portuguese Brazil. And the shippers involved were limited to Spanish, Portuguese, and American New Englanders.


In case you haven’t heard, the Amistad was a Spanish ship bound from West Africa with captured slaves to be sold in Cuba. The captives revolted and killed most of the crew.  After drifting for a long time, the ship was intercepted by a U.S. coast guard vessel and taken into a Connecticut port. (How it got that far north is not made clear in the movie.)


Thus the Amistad case relates largely to the history of West Africa and Latin America.  Only by an accident of navigation did it become an American issue, and then only as a case in admiralty and diplomacy. In the long run it was a minor case that set no precedents. Spielberg wants to make this incident bear the whole weight of the American slavery that lasted two and a half centuries and the Great Unpleasantness that ended it. Thousands of Amistad study kits were sent out to schools with this goal. The trouble is, as an account of American history, the thing will not bear the weight.  The Amistad had exactly nil influence on (eve of Civil War figures) the nearly four million American slaves (most of whom had been here for some generations); on the 395,000 slaveholding families; on the 488,000 free blacks (most of whom, contrary to the usual assumption, were in the South); nor on the issues and events which led to the bloodiest war in American history.  Of course, if there had been no slavery and no slave trade, there would today be no such thing as an African-American. The people would not exist.


One of Spielberg’s assistants called me early on, wanting advice on the characterisation of John C. Calhoun, who I am supposed to know something about.  For a moment visions of fat Hollywood fees danced before my eyes. Then, I remembered what Grandmother said:  Stand up straight, look ‘em in the eye, and always tell the truth. I had to say, well Calhoun had nothing to do with the Amistad case and nothing to say about it.  (The assistant, by the way, identified himself as a South Carolinian. By his speech and the fact that he had had a scholarship to Harvard, I assume he is an African-American.  He was very good, almost as slick as a young Strom Thurmond. I would advise him to come home and go into politics.)


Calhoun is shown in the movie (and the actor who plays him is good, by the way) as declaiming about slavery and impending civil war in relation to the case. This did not happen and could not have.  I have since learned where they got it.  Like Ken Burns, Spielberg’s people have been taken in by the great Boston-o-centric stream of American myth and “history.”  They got the idea of using Calhoun from Samuel F. Bemis’s romanticised biography, John Quincy Adams and the Union, as well as the idea that the case was some kind of major event and triumph for Adams. The idea of having Adams, one of the nastiest major figures in American history, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins as a shrewd, cuddly old teddy bear, I assume they thought up in Hollywood itself.  Get his picture and look at that cold hateful face some time. I guarantee the next time you have indigestion you will see it in your nightmare as one of the devils tormenting you in Hell. Randolph of Roanoke called him Blifel after the Puritan hypocrite in Tom Jones.


Bemis claimed that Calhoun introduced resolutions in the Senate on the Amistad case to “thwart” Adams.  (The statesman Calhoun never acted from such petty motives.)  Bemis even quoted two of the resolutions, conveniently leaving out the third which was specific.  In fact, Calhoun’s concern at this time was a different question.  British officials in Bermuda and the Bahamas were undertaking to free the slaves on American coastal vessels that came by stress of weather into their waters (It was common for plantation families to move with their slaves from the South Atlantic to the Gulf coast states by ship.) The British freed any who came into their hands, as a matter of policy. They also executed those guilty of killing, like the Amistad Africans, and later paid indemnity to the U.S., an admission of illegality.


Adams was at this time a marginailsed figure, a failed President who could not even get elected Governor of Massachusetts.  Calhoun was much more influential at this point.  By falsely setting up Adams as an antagonist to Calhoun, Bemis and the movie lend more importance to Adams than is deserved.  There is also the question of motivation.  It is all a love of liberty on Adams’s part, according to this rendering. (Part of the larger myth that the later brutal conquest of the Southern people by the government to establish a political and economic empire, something Adams longed for but did not live to see, was to be entirely explained as a righteous crusade to free the suffering black man.)


Adams had become President in an election that was brokered in the House of Representatives under cries of a “corrupt bargain.” He had proceeded to propose grandiose plans of centralisation and mercantilism, repudiating everything that had been taught by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. He was immediately shot down and destroyed by Southern strict constructionists. He hated what one of his descendants called “the sable genius of the South” and devoted his last years to attacking it.  It had nothing to do with freedom or with the welfare of people of African origin.


Foreign importation of slaves to the U.S. was illegal and negligible after 1808.  Participation in the slave trade to other countries was also illegal for Americans.  But in fact, New Englanders, who had plenty of shipping, continued to invest and participate in the traffic from Africa to Latin America on a considerable scale, including the Brown family who endowed Brown University, and Thomas H. Perkins, the Boston merchant prince who bankrolled Daniel Webster’s career, as well as many lesser fry. The last known New England slave ship, sailing out of Maine, was captured in1862, a year in which oceans of blood were being shed for the alleged purpose of freeing the slaves.


By the 1830s the British, who had not long before been the largest slave traffickers in the world, had declared emancipation (of a sort) in their colonies and undertaken to suppress the transatlantic trade by naval power.  Many governments, including the U.S., approved the object, but they were not too happy about the Brits claiming rights of search and seizure of other countries’ ships on the high seas, something which indeed Americans had declared war against in 1812.  In 1842, Americans agreed to participate in the suppression of the trade as long as the Brits followed strictly laid out rules.  Southern naval officers, diplomats, and other officeholders carried out their duties in this regard conscientiously and generally favored the policy.  For instance, Henry A. Wise, later governor of Virginia and a Confederate general, while he was U.S. Minister to Brazil in the 1840s made serious efforts to intercept the New Englanders trading Africans to that country.


The fact was, except for a few hotheads seeking to provoke the Yankees, there was no interest in the South in slave importations after the early 19th century, even though the demand was high. The natural increase was abundant, fertility and longevity being almost equal to the white. (There is still a difference today.) No one wanted to disrupt the settled and peaceful system that existed. The Confederate States Constitution, unlike that of the U.S., absolutely forbade foreign slave importations. The determination of Southerners to prevent malicious outsiders from interfering in their society is, of course, an entirely different question. Amistad diverts attention away from the real issues of American history.


Some other things about this movie that I find distorted.  Adams makes a pretty speech about liberty to the Supreme Court.  I do not find evidence that this speech was actually delivered.  What appears in the printed court record is legalistic, though it is possible the speech could have been made in unrecorded oral argument.  In the film, Cinque, the leader of the Amistad captives, is present in the Supreme Court, which did not happen.  And there is a totally fictional character, played by Morgan Freeman, an affluent free black man. Contra the film, no black man, no matter how affluent, would have been permitted to sit in a courtroom or ride in a carriage with white people in the North in 1839, especially in Connecticut.


This is mentioned in the film bur not dwelt on: The Northern judges who first dealt with the case ruled against the freedom of the Amistad captives.  The Supreme Court, with a majority of slaveholding Southerners, rendered the proper decision. The Africans had been illegally seized and were freed. Then, according to American law, they had to be sent back to Africa.  In addition, a law professor friend tells me the movie badly distorts the legal issues and proceedings of the case, though these take up most of the film.


Here is the real clincher, which you can bet is not in the movie. Samuel Eliot Morison, one of the leading American historians of all time, wrote in his Oxford History of the American People that Cinque, the leader of the Amistad blacks, went back to West Africa and became a slave trader himself (1965 edition, p. 520).  Being from Boston, Morison did not have to give any source for this statement and does not.   Some writers have affirmed, others have denied this story, none of them having cited any source. In fact, except for the court record, everything that has been portrayed about the Amistad case is in the realm of romance rather than historical scholarship. The court record is full of lawyers’ and diplomats’ lies, but at least it’s a document.


Morison’s story is inherently likely. He was well connected in New England maritime circles.  New England ships frequently went to the coast of West Africa to sell rum and buy slaves and could have easily heard news of Cinque.  Morison could have had the story word of mouth from an old man who had been there, or his descendants. Also, that Cinque became a slave trader is highly plausible.  What else could the man do? His native village had been dispersed.  West Africa had little else to trade for European goods except its people.  It would have been the best entrepreneurial opportunity open to him. The region’s economy and politics consisted largely of competition between chiefs for market share of captives to be sold.


To further develop the hokeyness of Amistad’s portrayal of American life and politics, let me review the unknown history of another slave ship case. In 1858, a U.S. navy vessel intercepted a suspicious looking ship near the Cuban coast.  It turned out to be the Echo out of Providence, Rhode Island, with over 400 Africans on board, many of them in very miserable condition. The officer who captured the slaver was John N. Maffitt, who a few years later would be famous as commander of the Confederate raider Florida.  The captain and owner of the slaver was Edward Townsend, a well-educated man from what passed for a good family in Rhode Island.  He alleged that the Africans were all war captives or families of executed criminals and he had saved them from certain death.  He also said that had he completed his voyage, he and his silent investors could have cleared $130,000, a staggering sum in those days.


Maffitt took Townsend to Key West to be prosecuted.  The Northern-born federal judge, later a Unionist, refused to take jurisdiction.  Maffitt then had him sent to Boston, where the court had jurisdiction on the presumed point of origin of the Echo. There the federal judge also refused to proceed and Townsend walked free, though guilty of a crime equivalent to piracy in U.S. and international law.


The Echo, its crew and captives were taken to Charleston. The people of Charleston provided them with food, clothing, and other necessities and treated them with sympathy.  The U.S, District Attorney in Charleston was James Conner, who a few years later would lose a leg fighting in the Confederate army.  Unable to get hold of Townsend, he vigorously prosecuted the crew.  The juries felt, however, probably correctly, that the miserable polyglot lot were as much victims as criminals, having been shanghaied or tricked into the voyage.  The mortality rate of the captives in the Yankee slave ship Echo was over 30 percent. The survivors were returned to Africa, though it was reported that many of them did not want to go. 


​I recount this case to provide some contrast to the cartoon version of the history of American slavery given in the movie. The movie gives a distorted picture and very possibly will arouse hatred at a time when it is the last thing needed.  The rehearsal of ancient guilt and outrage is not a healthy activity for Americans, African or otherwise. It requires selecting out a few scapegoats to blame for all the long record of the crimes, misfortunes, and follies of mankind. The psychologists call this projection. Its purpose is to save us the trouble of examining our own problems and sins.

You may read Part 1 here.

Colonial and Revolutionary Southern history does not have a strong presence in film, unless one counts the documentaries and pseudo-documentaries that make the Revolution a New England achievement and have George Washington and Thomas Jefferson talking like they came from Ohio. The celebrated television dramas about John Adams give him an anti-slavery opinion which he did not have at that time or ever, and portray Southerners as mincing fops or honourary Yankees like George Washington in (T) The Crossing.  (Will the television series (X)Sons of Liberty ever admit that Sam Adams was a slave owner?)

​** The New World (2005) is well-made and about as good as we are going to get for Jamestown and Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.  It brings out something of the drama and mystery of encounter with a new world.


 ** The Howards of Virginia (1940) is an example of a fairly sound treatment.  


(T) Sangaree (1953) is Hollywoodish but does give some idea of the early tobacco era in Virginia        


** The Patriot (2000), by Mel Gibson, is based (loosely) on the career of Francis Marion.  It makes some good points about some of the experiences of the War of Independence, although in presenting the war in South Carolina it is more of a comic book than a reliable history.


**The Great Meadow (1931).  Seeming a little innocent for the 21st century, this early talkie is an earnest effort to create for the screen Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s great novel of the early settlement of Kentucky.

​
WHAT COULD BE.  The Revolutionary War, after it was stalemated in the North, was won in the South, by Southerners.  But long ago the Revolution was made into a New England achievement and since then early American history has become irrelevant to a population that counts its origins in Ellis Island.   But imagine what a fantastic thing an independent free Southern film industry could be!  A real biography of Francis Marion; the British occupation and resistance in Charleston and South Carolina; the Battle of Kings Mountain; some of Simms’s Revolutionary War novels; the real life of Washington up to the point where he refused dictatorship and went home, like Cincinnatus; Morgan’s Virginia riflemen; a real life of Daniel Boone; the tragic fates of the South Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence; the real Constitutional Convention before it was distorted by nationalist reinterpretation. There is nothing that I know of on Jefferson, beloved for generations by most Americans, except one silly piece on alleged miscegenation, (X) Jefferson in Paris.
​

Given today’s ignorant and fanatical hatred of Southern history, it is interesting how generally sympathetic treatment of antebellum society was before the 1960s.  

​
**Jezebel (1938).  Bette Davis plays an imperious Southern belle who is transformed by love into an angel of mercy. Davis won an Academy Award for this role. Like many movies, good and bad, Jezebel is set in New Orleans. Davis, although from Boston, is quite good.  It is said that she was given this role as a consolation prize for losing out on Scarlett O’Hara in **Gone with the Wind.   Jezebel is considered one of Davis’s best roles and one that marked her rise to stardom.


(T) Way Down South (1939). Set in antebellum Louisiana, this over-imaginative musical gives an idea of what people think the Old South was like.


(T) Reap the Wild Wind  (1942). An OK John Wayne adventure set in antebellum Charleston and Florida.


(T) The Iron Mistress (1952).  This film depicts the life of the great Deep South pioneer Jim Bowie as portrayed by Alan Ladd.  It contains one possible version of the disputed origin of the famous knife that carries Bowie’s name and that was a weapon of choice for Southern men for several generations.  Bowie’s life is somewhat fictionalized and romanticised in the style of 1950s Hollywood, but the film depicts life in Louisiana and Mississippi in the 1820s and 1830s quite well.


Two films portraying the sectional conflict of the late antebellum era are worth presenting.   


**The Santa Fe Trail (1940), the story of Bleeding Kansas, Harpers Ferry, and John Brown.   Among the young newly-minted Army officers involved are Jeb Stuart, played by the dashing Errol Flynn, and George Custer, played by a rather plodding Ronald Reagan. (When was his performance not plodding?)  This film is a good example of the good will toward the South that characterised the American mainstream in the era it was made.   (I have never been able to understand why the title has nothing to do with the movie.)


** September Dawn (2007).  This is based on a true event.   A party of pioneers from Arkansas heading west paused briefly in Mormon territory.  For no apparent reason they were massacred (man, woman, and child) by the Mormons.  A surprisingly recent glimpse into the Yankee hatred of Southerners that so pervasively characterized the 1850s. The DVD includes interviews with descendants of the Southern victims.

Because of its deserved historical fame, the Texan War of Independence of the 1830s has attracted a lot of cinema.  ​

(T) The Alamo  (1960).  Best known, or most notorious, is this John Wayne production.  Wayne directed and sunk a lot of his own money into this film in the interest of well-intentioned rah-rah Americanism.  But the film is more Hollywood than Alamo.  Midwesterners Richard Boone, John Wayne, and Richard Widmark play the Southern heroes Houston, Crockett, and Bowie, and a Brit, Laurence Harvey, plays Travis. All too typically Hollywoodish are too much “comic relief” and the teeny bopper idol Frankie Avalon (who is said to have been frightened by snakes during the filming). The movie is Americanised at the expense of its Southern history. In fact, the Northern “Americans” who took over the U.S. half a century later in the WBTS hated and reviled the Texans who fought for their independence. I am sorry folks, but John Wayne, complete with coonskin cap and playing for humour, does not make Davy Crockett.  True, the real Crockett was a famous bear hunter and humourist.  He was also a well-dressed politician who owned several slaves.

**The Alamo (2004).  This is a much better version of the great Texan epic.  It is much more faithful to the historical event and has some real Texans, Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton as Houston and Crockett, and the Virginia-born Patrick Wilson as Travis.  This film is a real epic with genuine drama and historical sense.  The only thing I find wrong are two obligatory concessions to PC. The Spanish hidalgo Santa Anna is portrayed as a dumpy little mestizo that nobody would follow anywhere. The ending, when the survivor Mrs. Dickinson leaves the Alamo is falsified.  Actually, she left with her little girl and a slave boy. Even the Wayne version gets this right.


** Texas Rising (2015). This series also has some feel of real history, despite a ridiculous subplot about Santa Anna’s mulatto mistress who spies for the Texans. It presents the story of the war of independence with relative accuracy, with people who really act like they belong to the time and pays attention to some of the lesser known Texan heroes like Deaf Smith and Juan Seguin. And Santa Anna is well and appropriately portrayed by Oliver Martinez. 


(T)  Two for Texas (2013).  Based on a James Lee Burke novel, this movie is pretty good for the battle of San Jacinto.


**Gone to Texas (1986). This miniseries presents a believable picture of the life of Sam Houston (played by Sam Elliott) and the Texas War of Independence.

​
(T)  James A. Michener’s Texas (1994).  About what you can expect from a TV miniseries of its time made from a mediocre novel.  Some of the accents are well done and Bowie, Travis, and Santa Anna are good.  Much time is taken up by an irrelevant and unlikely romance. They keep talking about the rich land of Texas but everything is filmed on the dry and dusty plains. 

WHAT COULD BE:  If there were a real Southern cinema industry what could be done for American history!  How about a series on the remarkable early career of Andrew Jackson with an epic finale of the Battle of New Orleans, the date of which (January 8) was long celebrated by Americans second only to the Fourth of July?  Among other things such an epic would be a demonstration of genuine Southern multiculturalism as contrasted to the phony official multiculturalism of the U.S. today.  What a magnificent epic a film about Lewis and Clark could be produced by people with a real sense of history!  There are many other Old South topics and personalities that would make good cinema.  How about a life of Calhoun, that would educate Americans greatly about antebellum history, or a drama of the Great Triumvirate of Calhoun, Clay and Webster?   But, alas, all we have is an endless procession of dubious slavery films, beginning with the plagiarized fantasy (X) Roots.


EXECRABLES:  Poor imitations of Andrew Jackson have appeared in several films and Charlton Heston’s portrayal in (X) The President’s Lady (1953) fails as history.  The same can be said about (X) The Far Horizons (1955), allegedly about the Lewis and Clark expedition.  (X) The Jayhawkers (1959):  Jayhawkers was the name applied to the vicious Republican gangs from Kansas who terrorised Missouri before and during the War Between the States.  In this movie “Jayhawkers” are bad Southern bandits.


I once saw an Italian movie called Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In this film a group of Catholic priests and monks are operating a fort in the South in which they militantly protect runaway slaves.  It is hard to get any more ridiculous than this.  Southerners would not have tolerated such a thing for a minute.  Further, despite what Catholics of today like to believe, the Church never condemned the domestic slavery of the Old South. Pio Nino expressed sympathy for the Confederacy and sent priests to combat Yankee recruitment of cannon fodder in Ireland. The Church did condemn abolitionists, most of whom were extremely anti-Catholic, as dangerous radicals. 


The ad for a PBS epic on slavery tells us of “an African prince” who was “imprisoned on a Mississippi plantation” for years.  It is hard for people with no understanding of the past or of human nature to grasp, but plantations were not prisons.  There was no barbed wire, no guard dogs, no watchtowers, no armed jailers, and very few locks. Frequently planters slept in an unlocked house with their slaves.  Nor do I think “prince” was a common term among Africans, there being no clear hereditary rule of descent for rulers, who were generally the last survivors of bloodbaths.

​
The black face minstrel show was a standby of American popular culture, particularly in the North where it was invented.  Dozens of movies over a long period featured musical and comedy black-face material.  For instance, the famous Bing Crosby’s (X) Dixie (1943).  It is set in the antebellum period and is a highly fictionalized biography of Dan Emmet, the writer of the great American song “Dixie.” 

The primary purpose of this series of weekly essays is to identify films that are enjoyable, satisfying, and informative for Southern people, native or adopted.  For better or worse, like it or not, movies are a major entertainment and art form of our time.  Most of us will spend a good many hours in a lifetime watching them.  Their stories and characters have real impact on the way we see the world.


The cinema has existed for over a century now and has produced an immense volume.  No one can possibly master the field.  We can only make a guide to what we have found to be worthwhile.  This becomes more important as American film, like American society, sinks steadily into ever further depravity.  In today’s cinema, sex, violence, perversion, and obscene language are pervasive, although tobacco smoking and Confederate flags are forbidden immoralities.  We, of course, expect that families will exercise judgment as to what is or is not appropriate for the young.


The South is a large segment of American life, with a long-lived separate history and culture—if not a nation of its own then certainly the next thing to it.  Its representation in American movies follows an irregular path that reflects the particular times in which films were produced.   Up to the 1960’s, Hollywood had friendly tolerance and even admiration and affection for the South.  Since then the main motif has been hatred and slander that casts us Southerners in the role of devils or clowns.  This latter is not surprising since the South remains a reservoir of conservative, telluric connection to Western civilisation and thus an enemy to those who want to replace civilisation with an egalitarian and libertine world of their own defective imagination. 


Mainstream America lacks any real cultural identity.  So, it has often sought to define itself as the righteous Non-South, using the South as the hated Internal Other that is the source of all the sins that Americans fancy they are not guilty of.   Or else it has tended to absorb what is favoured about the South into an artificial “America,” as in George Washington talking and acting like he was from Ohio.   We are often either evil unAmericans or honourary Yankees.  All of this reflects the psychological needs of Northerners, including the masters of the media, and says little about the real Southern people. 


Twentieth-century American filmography is so vast that a lifetime of study could barely master it.  Just the bad films about the South would take a large chapter to list.  What we have done is call to attention a number of things which Southerners might watch with interest and pleasure.  We have also pointed to some of the worst of the many distorted and offensive manifestations of   Hollywood’s hatred of the Southern people.


The most important human wisdom is contained in stories, not in formal expositions.  (Think Incarnation.)  In times past people got their stories from the classics, the Bible, and the novel.  Movies are now the primary story-telling medium.  Stories are guides to and an expression of a people’s culture and their culture is best understood from their stories.  Actors and actresses give some evidence of the state of culture because acting, if well done, is a form of cultural expression that requires some art—intelligence, grace, imagination, empathy.  


Southerners are in the position of having our talents exploited and our stories filtered through the misperceptions of hostile outsiders.  We are the only people of the American Empire who are persistently and safely slandered by Hollywood.

​
The South is immensely rich in history and human quality. We have all the ingredients for a great cinema to rival the best of other nations.  There is real Southern talent enough on both sides of the camera to create a true Southern cinema.  But, of course, there is no money, without which there can be no film— unlike literature, in which it is still barely possible to publish good books.  If Southerners were free, actually or spiritually, to tell our own stories like the other peoples of the world, there could be a world class Southern cinema.  The most beautiful of all the world’s national flags and the most rousing of all the world’s national anthems would be honoured by good people everywhere. 

** Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films.  The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion.

(T)   Tolerable but not among the most highly recommended

(X)   Execrable.  Avoid at all costs

​NOTE:  Most of the research for this book was done in the age of the DVD.  “Streaming” is now becoming dominant.  There should be no difficulty in finding the recommended films in that medium.

“ . . .  the play’s the thing . . .”       –Hamlet, Prince of Denmark


 The treatment of Southerners by Hollywood has been schizophrenic.   To today’s provincially urban masters of Hollywood, whose idea of American history begins with Ellis Island, Southerners are unfamiliar and considered strange and dangerous.  Films set in the South quite often portray ugly people and situations.  Southern accents are invariably the sign of a villain, even in stories set in Boston, Chicago, California, or Alaska.  There is a whole library of evil Southerner movies.  However, at the same time, films about ordinary folks set in the South sometimes have likable characters even today.  Because many Americans know from personal experience that Southerners are not cartoon villains but often honourable and agreeable people. 


From the earliest days of American movies through the 1950s, almost a half century, the Hollywood portrayal of the South was to a considerable extent friendly and even admiring.   The 1950’s and 1960’s continued this tradition but tended to absorb what is Southern into a generic Americanism that eclipsed its Southern aspects. This was the era when historical dramas were good on costumes but bad and silly on history.  (I am reminded of a movie director in an Evelyn Waugh novel who gave John Wesley a sword and a mistress.)  In the 50’s and 60’s blue-eyed starlets played Indian maidens; Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Natalie Wood became mulatto, apparently because they had dark hair; the avuncular Midwesterner Ronald Reagan was taken seriously as a Westerner; a coonskin cap identified a ridiculously unhistorical Davy Crockett; and “country music” singers had to disguise their Southernness by wearing pseudo-cowboy outfits. 


Curiously, in the 1960’s and 1970’s the South rode high in popular culture even as the cinema began to be pervasively South-hating.  The Southern persona of Burt Reynolds flourished.  Southern TV shows had the highest national ratings in the age of Jimmy Carter with The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, Hew-Haw, and a little later The Dukes of Hazzard.  Perhaps the difference between television and film relates to the fact that television responds to ratings while movie directors are free to indulge their own distorted view of the world.


Of course, Southern characters were only popular because they could be condescended to as inferior to Northerners.   Even when good people, such TV Southerners were invariably comically backward and ignorant. Apparently in contrast to the North, where all the women are cool, poised, and beautiful Meryl Streeps and all the men are suave and dashing Tom Cruises (or cool, beautiful Meryl Streeps).  Curiously, through a long period of history Southerners were noted for their gentlemanly and ladylike qualities.  Anyone who has spent any time around rich Ivy Leaguers knows that any Southern “redneck” has better manners, a kindlier attitude toward strangers, more chivalry, and more personal integrity than the Northeastern “aristocracy.”


The schmaltz of the 50’s quickly gave way to the revolutionary 60’s and 70’s and a South-friendly Hollywood began to turn into a South-hating Hollywood.  Since then the South has usually fared badly with Hollywood. 


Until the late 60’s, our cinema—whether contemporary or costume drama, comedy, Western, or war—reflected a general baseline of Middle American values.  It was not usually great art, but it was consoling entertainment and a source and reflection of a national consensus.  And it portrayed with sympathy the real “diversity” of this far-flung Union—New England, the Big Apple, the South, the Midwest, and the West.


The catastrophe known as The Sixties was marked by a collapse of morals, political fanaticism and violence, multiculturalism, and the ever tighter centralised control and enforced uniformity of all phases of life by the bicoastal elite—accompanied by degradation of the American cinema.  Now we have godless nihilism and self-indulgence, violence for violence’s sake, every form of sexual promiscuity, filth for the sake of filth, and “creativity” generally limited to technological fantasy, sequels, prequels, dramatization of comic books, and rip-offs of European and Japanese stories. The masters of our multicultural monoculture have little talent but plenty of power and money and our cinema now reflects their minds and souls.


This is not the whole picture, of course. There are still “independent” productions that portray actual American people and situations and that manage to come to public attention. It is possible, with some enterprise, to make a good movie.  The problem is getting anyone to hear about it and get it distributed.  The mass media seldom reflect anything but what works our masters want to be celebrated and the absence of those works they want to be censored or ignored.  All you need to remember is the reception given Mel Gibson’s **The Passion of the Christ and Ron Maxwell’s historical epic **Gods and Generals.


There was one positive aspect to Hollywood’s turn from the happy talk of the frothy, phony 1950’s to a more mature and serious approach:  more realism about the history of America and other lands.  The 2004 version of **The Alamo is greatly superior to the 1960 John Wayne version in truth and drama.  **The New World of 2005 is better than anything previously done by Hollywood on Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.  Likewise, the 1992   **Last of the Mohicans is more vividly real than earlier versions.  **The Virginian of 2000 is head and shoulders above its many predecessors.  Liberation from the childish 50’s has had some positive benefits.


Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the story-telling medium that reaches the largest audience and captures the attention of us all, high and low, wise and foolish.  It is also true that movies, like literature and architecture, reflect something of the soul of the particular nation that produces them. If so, judging by Hollywood, we indeed need to be concerned about the American soul.

After a screening in the White House, President Wilson remarked: “It is like writing history with lightning.  And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Birth dealt with the War Between the States and Reconstruction in a portrayal primarily centered on a Southern family and with many of the major stars of silent cinema.  Although its importance can hardly be denied, the film is now out of favour, largely because of a realistic portrayal of the Southern oppression in Reconstruction that Wilson described as “so terribly true.”  


Actually, there is nothing in the movie that any reasonable Northerner of the time could not have agreed with.  Birth is very much a landmark of the spirit of sectional reconciliation that prevailed at the time, two years after the friendly reunion of Northern and Southern soldiers at Gettysburg.  There is a generous treatment of a Northern family and an inter-regional romance. The only dubious note is a somewhat saccharine portrayal of Lincoln, but this was very much in the spirit of the time.  Southerners found it useful to portray a kindly Lincoln who, if he had lived, would have avoided the worst evils of Reconstruction. There are various versions available, but the most complete seems to be the one of 192 minutes.


Griffith produced many other films of lasting interest.  Although condemned as “racist,” both Griffith and the Southerner Thomas Dixon, on whose books Birth was based, were liberals for their time in the true sense of that label.  They attacked the excesses of capitalism and defended working people and immigrants in an era when respectable Northerners were devoted to Big Business and ideas of Anglo-Saxon superiority.  


**The General (1926).  Two of the great silent classics of early American cinema have Confederate connections, and indeed both are on any list of the world’s greatest movies.  One is The Birth of a Nation. The other is The General starring the inimitable Buster Keaton.  It is based on a true story of a Southern railroad man who engaged in a heroic long-range pursuit of a train stolen by Yankee soldiers.  (“The General” is the name of the stolen locomotive.) Keaton is the Confederate who is disappointed (as is his sweetheart) at his not being allowed to join the army because of the importance of his job.  No viewer can forget the heroic aspirations, the   incomparable action, humour, and the pathos of this film. Orson Welles called it the greatest comedy and probably the greatest movie ever made.  (Disney did a tolerable film of the same incident as (T) The Great Locomotive Chase.)

​**Judge Priest (1934).  It is said that John Ford, later among the greatest of American directors, was one of the Ku Klux riders in Birth of a Nation. In Judge Priest, taken from the popular Irvin S. Cobb stories, Ford makes a gentle portrayal of people in postwar Kentucky proud of their recent Confederate cause. The star of that film was Will Rogers, certainly one of the greats of early American movies and another son of a Confederate soldier.  (I once read a description of Rogers as “a Midwestern humorist.”  This for the Oklahoma son of an officer in the Confederate Cherokee brigade who gently criticized Yankee ways in his pioneer radio commentaries!  (As far as I know Ohio and Iowa are not noted for humour.)   Rogers was   undoubtedly the No. 1 American movie star and a beloved figure when he made Judge Priest.  All of Rogers’s films are enjoyable and clearly if not obtrusively Southern.

**The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Ford liked Judge Priest so well that he did the same story again, perhaps even better, in The Sun Shines Bright. These films show an attractive Southern life—post-Confederate plain folks who had their foibles like all of us but created decent and pleasant communities. ​

​**My Old Kentucky Home (1935). In his last film Will Rogers is a shrewd horse trainer who solves a long-standing family feud.

Note: This piece was originally published in 2015.

​What to say in brief compass about the South?—a subject that is worthy of the complete works of a Homer, a Shakespeare, or a Faulkner. The South is a geographical/historical/cultural reality that has provided a crucial source of identity for millions of people for three centuries. Long before there was an entity known as “the United States of America.” there was the South. Possibly, there will still be a Southern people long after the American Empire has collapsed upon its hollow shell.


One fine historian defined the South as “not quite a nation within the nation, but the next thing to it.” The late M.E. Bradford, whose genial spirit watches over us even now, defined the South as “a vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity assumed by those who have contributed to it.” This is, characteristically, a broad and generous definition. He proceeded to illustrate that when visualizing the South, he always thought “of Lee in the Wilderness that day when his men refused to let him assume a position in the line of fire and tugged at the bridle of Traveler until they had turned him aside.” This was clearly a society at war, not a government military machine.


The South is larger and more salient in population, territory, historical import, distinctive folkways, music, and literature than many of the separate nations of the earth. Were the South independent today, it would be the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world. Citizens of Minneapolis consider them¬selves cultured because of their Japanese-conducted symphony that plays European music, and assume that the Nashville geniuses who create music all the world loves are rubes and hayseeds. New Yorkers pride themselves on their literary culture. Yet in the second half of the 20th century, if you subtract Southern writers. American literature would be on par with Denmark or Bulgaria and somewhere below Norway and Rumania.


Southerners are the most regionally loyal citizens of the United States. But paradoxically—or perhaps not—they have traditionally been the most loyal to the country at large, ready to repel insult or injury without the need to be dragooned by any ridiculous folderol about saving Haiti or Somalia for democracy. Southerners have given freely to the Union and generally avoided the demands for entitlements that now characterize American life. But their loyalty has been severely tested, especially considering all they have ever asked in return is to be left alone.


Southerners have less reason to be loyal to the collective enterprise of the United States than does any group of citizens. The South was invaded, laid waste, and conquered when it tried to uphold the original and correct understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It took 22 million Northerners, aided by the entire plutocracy and proletariat of the world, four years of the bloodiest warfare in American history and the most unparalleled terrorism against civilians, to subdue five million Southerners—all followed by the horror of Reconstruction. During this entire period, “the Northern conservatives” never opposed the smallest obstacle to the devastations of the radicals. In fact, the Northern “conservatives” have never, in the course of American history, conserved anything.


Since the War, the South has been a colonial possession, economically and culturally, to whatever sleazy elements have been able to exercise national power. A major theme of the American media and popular culture is ridicule and contempt for everything Southern. A major theme of American historical writing is the portrayal of the South as the unique repository of evil in a society that is otherwise shining and pure.


A severely condensed but essentially accurate interpretation of American history could be stated thusly. There are two kinds of Americans. There are those who want to be left alone to pursue their destiny, restrained only by tradition and religion: and those whose identity revolves around compelling others to submit to their own manufactured vision of the good society.


These two aspects of American culture were formed in the 17th century, by the Virginians and Yankees, respectively. The Virginians moved into the interior of America and carved their farms and plantations out of the wilderness. Their goal was to re-create the best of English rural society. They merged with even more vigorous and independent people, the Scots-Irish, to form what is still the better side of the American character.


The Yankees of Massachusetts lived in villages with preacher and teacher. They viewed themselves as a superior, chosen people, a City upon a Hill. As far as they were concerned, they were the true Americans and the only Americans that counted, ignoring or slandering other Americans relentlessly — a sentiment persisting to this day.


The days of Jefferson and Jackson illustrate the freedom and honor underlying America when ruled by the South. During their eras, Virginians gave away their vast Western empire for the joint enjoyment of all Americans, (thus making possible the Midwest and West) and labored to erect a limited, responsible government. The New Englanders, during the same periods, demanded a reserve of lands for themselves in Ohio; instituted a national bank and funding system by which their money-men profited off the blood of the Revolution: passed the Alien and Sedition laws to essentially enforce their own narrow ideological code on others; opposed the Louisiana Purchase; and demanded tariffs to protect their industries at others’ expense. All of which was done in the name of “Americanism.”


This profiteering through government, which John Taylor of Caroline called the “paper aristocracy,” has always been accompanied by moral imperialism and assumptions of superiority that are even more offensive than the looting. It is from this that the South seceded. It is this combination of greed and moralism which constitutes the Yankee legacy, gives the American empire whatever legitimacy it can claim, and fuels the never-ending reconstruction of society. That is why we use Marines for social work, so that our leaders can congratulate themselves on their moral posture. That is why every town in the land is burdened with empty parking spaces bearing the symbol of the empire, so that the Connecticut Yankee George Bush can posture over his charity to the disabled. That is why, right now, wealthy Harvard University receives from the treasury a 200 percent overhead bonus on its immense federal grants, while the impoverished University of South Carolina receives only 50 percent of its much smaller bounty.


The term American is an abstraction without human content —it refers, at best, to a government, territory, standard of living, and a set of dubious and dubiously observed propositions. It refers to nothing akin to values or culture, nothing that represents the humanness of human beings. It could be reasonably argued that there is no such thing as an American people, although we have persuaded ourselves there was when shouldering the burdens of several wars. There was perhaps a time earlier in this century when an American nationality might have emerged naturally. But that time has passed with the onslaught of new immigrants.


Unlike the term American, when we say Southern, we know we imply a certain history, literature, music, and speech: particular folkways, attitudes and manners: a certain set of political responses and pieties: and a traditional view of the proper dividing line between the private and the public. Things which are unique, easily observable, and continual over many generations.


The bloody St. Andrews cross of the Confederacy is a symbol throughout the world of heroic resistance to oppression —except in the U.S., where it is in the process of suppression. Southerners are democratic in spirit, but they have never made a fetish of democracy and certainly not of what Mel Bradford called “Equality.” With T.S. Eliot, Southerners intuitively recognize that democracy is a procedure and not a goal, a content, or a substitute for an authentic social fabric. However free and equal we may be, we are nothing without a culture, and there is no culture without religion.


The South, many believe, still has a substantial authentic culture, both high and folk, and it still has a purchase on Christianity. That is, the South is a civilizational reality in a sense which the United States is not, and it will last longer than the American Empire.


For a long time we have been asking what the South can do for the United States. A proper question to now ask is what can the United States do for the South? The Union is nothing except for its constituent parts. The Union is good and just to the degree that it fosters its authentic parts. That is precisely why our forefathers made the Constitution and the Union and gave consent, voluntarily, to them —to enhance themselves, not the government.


As the Southern poet Allen Tate pointed out, the wrong turn was taken in the War Between the States when the United States ceased living by the Southern conception of a limited partnership and became instead a collection of buildings in Washington from which orders of self-justifying authority were issued. The great classical scholar and Confederate soldier Basil Gildersleeve remarked that the War was a conflict over grammar—whether the proper grammar was “the United States are” or “the United States is.” We have been using the wrong grammar.

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The South’s lost political legacy was laid out by Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney, Presbyterian theologian and Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff, several years following the War. Echoing Calhoun he said:

Note: This piece was originally published in 2000.

To anyone who has spent some time with the Framers and ratifiers of the US Constitution, most current talk about that document seems not about the Constitution at all but about some fanciful construct of wishful thinking, accumulated misunderstandings, and successful usurpations. This is certainly so in regard to recent discussions of the Electoral College.

True, the Electoral College was, as is now complained of, in part designed to take the selection of president a remove or two from the people. The reason for this was not to thwart the people's will but to induce deliberation and mature consideration of the public good and virtues of candidates by persons who were in a position to have some knowledge of the matter. This design, of course, has been rendered null by the machinations of political parties. Electors are now anonymous party hacks whose names often do not even appear on the ballot and who would not know what you are talking about if you mentioned deliberation and judgement.

But an even more important consideration in the design of the Electoral College was the representation of the states. There was no possibility of a mass vote, since each state set its own qualifications for the franchise and chose the electors in its own manner - by the legislature or by districts in the beginning. States no longer set their franchise. The federal government now requires us to allow 18-year-olds to vote and register aliens when they show up at the drivers' license bureau.

Nevertheless, the Electoral College, at least potentially, represents the states. The smaller states were given more weight, by a design (and necessity at the time) that permeates the real Constitution. If the Electoral College yielded no majority, the House of Representatives was to make the choice, with each state having one vote. In fact, the Framers expected this to happen quite often. 

The functioning of the Electoral College was perverted in the 19th century by political party organizations. The people could (and can today) vote only for candidates selected by party conventions, which are neither democratic nor recognized by the Constitution. (A lot of Americans probably think the two parties are part of the Constitution.) This is, in fact, a much more serious denial of majority rule than the weight given to small states in the college. So is the winner-take-all system, another invention of the party hacks.

There is nothing in the Constitution that requires all the votes of a state to go to one candidate. According to present practice, a candidate may win California with 35-percent vote in a three-way race and receive all of California's electoral votes, thereby disenfranchising two thirds of the voters. The only reason for this is that it is convenient for political parties.

If we really wanted to live up to the majority rule and preserve the virtues of the Electoral College, we would take the high constitutional function away from parties and choose electors by districts as independents - men and women known for character and reason and understanding of the people they represent. (Of course, they would have to be real districts, not ones designed by federal judges to maximize the success of favored groups.)

They would assemble in their state capitals and vote after deliberation and without reference to party organization or to polls and predictions and media declarations of winners on the basis of one percent of the votes. This would be closer to majority rule and the real Constitution, and the results might be quite interesting.

This article was used as expert testimony presented in several federal court cases:

Scholars in every field in the humanities and social sciences have long recognized that Southerners have formed a distinct people within the body of Americans from the earliest colonial times to the present. Authorities in history, political science, economics, sociology, folklore, literature, geography, speech, and music, have recognized and studied the significance of this distinctiveness. The distinct identity of Southerners has also, of course, been a commonplace of everyday life in the United States, and distinctive Southern manners, customs, attitudes and behavior have been material for our greatest creative artists in song, story and movie-making.
Nearly every college in the United States and many in Europe (as well as Japan and Australia) offer courses in Southern history, literature, and other subjects. A number of universities have special institutes devoted to study of the South. (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of South Carolina, the University of Mississippi, John Hopkins University, and Cambridge University are a few examples.) Thousands of scholars around the world are studying Southernness. Thousands of books and dozens of popular and academic journals and websites are available today that are devoted specifically and exclusively to the South. It cannot be credited that this activity would be devoted to something unless it was real and significant.


Many explanations and descriptions have been offered in scholarly literature as to the origins and nature of a distinctive Southern people, beginning with the ethnic origins of the American colonial population and coming up to recent date in studies of public opinion and voting behavior.


An important, recent and authoritative study is Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer, prize-winning Professor of History at Brandeis University, Boston (New York: Oxford University Press. 1989). From exhaustive study in Britain and America, Fischer has identified four different cultural groups from the British Isles that formed differentiated cores of cultural development in what has become the United States. These groups came from different regions of Britain and were separated by religious denomination, economic activity, dialect, manners, and customs.


1) Puritan settlers of New England who came from the East Anglia region of England and formed an identifiable religious and cultural group, which spread to other parts of the Northern states.


2) Settlers from the English Midlands and Wales who settled the Delaware River Valley, belonged to a variety of dissenting religions such as Quakers and Baptists, and pursued economic activities and goals different from those of New England and the South.


3) Gentry and servants from the English southern counties who settled Virginia and the Carolinas in the 17th century, largely Anglican, engaged in plantation agriculture, and displaying manners, customs and attitudes very distinct from groups 1 and 2.


4) Borderers, sometimes loosely described as Celtic, who came from Ireland, Scotland, and the Scots-English border region. They were largely Presbyterian and their ways of living and making a living were markedly different from those of the ordinary English. They settled the Piedmont regions of the Southern colonies and spread across the Appalachians in the late 18th century.


Fischer piles up convincing data that these groups formed different cultural centers in the evolution of America. Groups 3 and 4 merged in the early 19th century, to become the Southern people. The distinctiveness of a Southern people was well recognized by everyone by that time—by Southerners, by Northerners, and by foreign travelers. The famous English writer Charles Dickens observed after a trip to America that the Americans formed two distinct peoples. Fischer also provides extensive and convincing evidence that these distinct American cultures persist to this day, a distinctiveness, which can be seen in attitudes, political behavior, and daily life. An interesting example he provides is the startlingly different actions and methods of leadership of two American generals in the Pacific theatre during World War II, both named Smith, one from the North and one a Southerner. Countless other examples can be cited showing such differences in recent history.


Historians have also identified as keys to Southernness climate and a historical experience that differs markedly from the general American. The South was warmer than the North and the regions of Europe from which settlers of America came, giving it a different kind of agriculture and crops (cotton, rice, tobacco, sugar), and thus a different kind of economic activity and a different relation to the marketplace than the rest of the United States. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided in the 1920s to commission a definitive history of American agriculture, it found that it required two distinct studies to cover the subject: Percy W. Bidwell, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (Washington: 1925), and Lewis Cecil Gray, Historyof Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington: 1933). Southerners have, unlike other Americans, more than 350 years of living in a biracial society, in which whites and African-Americans have reciprocally influenced each other’s development. It should never be forgotten that the number of African-Americans outside the states of the South was statistically insignificant throughout American history up to World War I. In evidence of a distinct Southern culture, it should be pointed out that Southern African-Americans share with Southern whites nearly every aspect of Southern culture except ethnic origin and political behavior, and differ from general American attitudes in the same direction as do white Southerners.


Undoubtedly the most decisive historical event in firmly establishing a Southern people was the failed War of Independence of 1861-1865. Unlike all other Americans, Southerners have suffered military defeat and occupation and massive destruction by invading armies on their soil. The Confederate States of America was characterized by a mobilization and casualties far beyond that ever experienced by any other Americans at any time in their history. (Gary Gallagher of the University of Virginia, The Confederate War, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.) It is estimated that 85 percent of the eligible male population was mobilized in the War of Independence and one of every four Southern white men was dead at the end of the War. (Comparison: Northern losses were 1 in 10; and the loss was simultaneously made up by immigrants. American losses in later years are trivial percentages in comparison.) The experience of total war, invasion, conquest and defeat had effects, both tangible and psychological, that have lasted for generations and that mark Southerners now living. War is the single greatest solidifier of a nationality, and it is hardly credible that Southerners would have fought to such an extremity for independence if they had not been conscious of being a separate people.


C. Vann Woodward, Pulitzer Prize historian of Yale University in his famous study The Burden of Southern History (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), has emphasized this distinctive experience as giving Southerners a heritage of defeat and sorrow. Coupled with longstanding guilt and frustration from the difficulty of race relations, this burden of history has made Southerners a sadder, less optimistic, but perhaps wise and more realistic people than other Americans whose history has been one of uninterrupted success.


Woodward points also to another consequence of the War. In contrast to America in general, which has been a land of opportunity, progress, and prosperity, Southerners, both white and African-American, have a long experience of poverty. The most prosperous region of the United States in 1860, the South was from 1866 to at least World War II the most impoverished. An estimated 60 percent of the region’s capital was destroyed by the War, leaving it economically helpless and subject to exploitation of its resources and peoples as a colony of the United States. In 1860 nearly all white Southern families were independent landowners. In 1900, forty percent of white Southerners were tenants or sharecroppers. And 60 percent of African-American Southerners were in this position, though in absolute numbers there were more white sharecroppers than black. In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously referred to the South as “the nation’s No. 1 Economic Problem,” and public discussions were full of references to the South’s colonial economic status.


The South has long been known as a source of cheap labor. As well as African-Americans, hundreds of thousands of white Southerners have moved to the North and West in the 20th century, as industrial labor. In the North and West they were treated as and understood themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, referred to negatively as “hillbillies” and “Okies.” Evidences of this can still be seen (like “Little Dixie” neighborhoods in Chicago and country music in Bakersfield, California). It is impossible to over-estimate the effects of generations of poverty within a prosperous country in forming a distinct Southern identity. Even in currently prosperous and growing areas of the South today, the better jobs are largely occupied by newcomers from other parts of the country and the blue-collar jobs by native Southerners.


Southern differences in manners, speech, recreations, religious beliefs, cuisine, and music are commonplace observations in everyday life in the United States. These differences do not have to be absolute. Scots and some Irish and Welsh speak English and are like Englishmen in various was, but they are still obviously distinct nationalities, as are the French-descended Canadians. Speech, religion, music, manners, and cuisine are the universal markers of ethnic distinction. The proof of distinctive Southern characteristics in these areas is easily established by the well-known negative (and sometimes positive) reactions that Southerners receive from other groups.


Contemporary markers distinguishing Southerners as a distinct group have been given systematic scientific study, in the works of John Shelton Reed, Kenan Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially The Enduring South.


Besides differences in lesser matters such as names of children, places, and businesses, Reed demonstrates that public opinion surveys have consistently shown statistically significant differentiation from the American average, especially in three areas:


1) Southerners are the most consistent believers in basic orthodox Christianity as measured by their belief in the Bible, a future state of rewards and punishments, and the reality of Evil, as well as in their church attendance. They even outscore Roman Catholics in other parts of the country on these factors.


2) Southerners are more local and family oriented, less interested in distant events and celebrities than Americans in general.


3) Southerners, for better or worse, live by a different definition of the line between private and public. They are more conscious of giving and receiving offense and tend to deal with such things in person rather than call in public authorities. For instance, in the South murders most commonly occur between persons who are acquainted. In the North there are more commonly attacks by strangers.


Reed has also demonstrated through scientific attitude surveys that Northern and Southern students at the cosmopolitan University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recognize themselves as having different thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The distinctions discovered by Reed are not absolute—there is some overlap—but they are statistically significant (as well as readily confirmed by empirical observation). See the article by Reed from the Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.


Another relevant work is The South and the Sectional Conflict by David M. Potter of Stanford University, generally recognized as one of the outstanding historians in the United States in the 20th century (Louisiana State University Press, 1968). Potter affirms the separateness of the Southern people and describes how that difference has been created by distinct folkways (thinking, feeling, behaving in ways common to members of the same social group) and separate political experiences.


The hallmarks of a living national culture are its production of arts both at the folk level (arising spontaneously from the people) and at the level of high culture. Southerners have produced several original styles of music and it is hardly to be doubted that Southern writers have produced a distinct (and highly regarded by the world) literature. The acclaimed novelist George Garrett has demonstrated that distinctive Southernness persists in the most recent generation of outstanding writers. And he has interestingly related Southern literary prowess to the distinctive manners of the region. George Garrett, “Southern Literature Here and Now,” in Fifteen Southerners, Why the South Will Survive (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1981).


The history of a distinctive Southern speech has been examined by the world famous literary scholar and critic Cleanth Brooks (Yale University) in The Language of the American South (University of Georgia Press, 1985). Brooks has demonstrated how distinctive Southern speech has contributed to the success of Southern literary efforts. The distinctiveness of Southern accents was part of the lifelong study of the greatest American scholar of English dialects, Raven I. McDavid of the University of Chicago, author of Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (Chicago, 1980 and later editions) and Sociolinguistics and Historical Linguistics (University of Odense, Denmark).


That Southerners can be distinguished by differing voting behavior is a commonplace calculation of politicians and news media and is the subject of much continuing study by political scientists.


Establishing the reality of the Southerner is akin to proving that Iowa grows corn or that Hollywood is located in California. When the term “Southern” is used, there is not a mind in America that does not immediately reference impressions, favorable or unfavorable, of particular history, literature, music, cuisine, manners, and political and religious tendencies.


I would like to conclude my expert testimony with a personal statement derived from a speech I made at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in New Orleans in 1995, parts of which were published in the journal Southern Cultures (University of North Carolina). It refers not to the “Civil War” but to Southern identity today:


The Confederate Battle Flag: A Symbol of Southern Heritage and Identity


I remember my own father and uncles returning from World War II with stories of how Southerners, particularly rural and working class ones, were denigrated and ridiculed by urbanites for their speech, manners, and attitudes. There was a general cultural attack at the time on “hillbillies.” This was the beginning of my consciousness of belonging to a separate people from other Americans. It was at that time that we began to display the Confederate battle flag at times from the front porch and to observe Lee’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day. It is relevant, too, that my grandmother was the daughter of a Confederate soldier and had a fund of stories of the family in the War. Our identification with the Confederate battle flag was nearly a decade before Brown vs. Board of Education and it had nothing to do with segregation, the Dixiecrat movement of 1948, or football, contrary to what has been stated by several scholars who have claimed to study the matter impartially.


My Southern identity had thus been brought to my attention before I entered school, and the battle flag was the obvious symbol of that identity, and a beautiful and hallowed object as well. Time, and the success of the civil rights movement and other great changes in the South, have done nothing to diminish this. Rather, to the contrary. The fact that the United States is increasingly a multicultural empire rather than a federal republic, will make ethnic identities, including the Southern, even sharper in the future, which bodes well to see symbolic struggles among Northerners, Latin Americans, African-Americans and Asians. Southerners, the oldest and largest minority in America, have a right to claim their heritage and its symbols. The South is larger in territory, population, economic strength, and history and more distinct in culture than many of the separate nations of the earth.


In recent years, I have spoken often to meetings of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Civil War Roundtables, local historical societies, and other groups. These groups of good citizens are full of defenders and displayers of the battle flag. For most of these good Americans the flag is not a symbol of white supremacy, but an identification with their own ancestors and heritage and an affirmation of then own identity.
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Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action.


Two generations ago, the most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.


I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.


Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of economic exploitation and the seizure of the common government for the first time ever by a sectional party declaredly hostile to the Southern States. Were they to be a permanently exploited minority, they asked? This was significant to people who knew that their fathers and grandfathers had founded the Union for the protection and benefit of ALL the States.


It is no surprise that they mentioned potential interference with slavery as a threat to their everyday life and their social structure. Only a few months before, John Brown and his followers had attempted just that. They murdered a number of people including a free black man who was a respected member of the Harpers Ferry community and a grand-nephew of George Washington because Brown wanted Washington’s sword as a talisman. In Brown’s baggage was a constitution making him dictator of a new black nation and a supply of pikes to be used to stab to death the slave-owner and his wife and children.


It is significant that not one single slave joined Brown’s attempted blow against slavery. It was entirely an affair of outsiders. Significant also is that six Northern rich men financed Brown and that some elements of the North celebrated him as a saint, an agent of God, ringing the church bells at his execution. Even more significantly, Brown was merely acting out the venomous hatred of Southerners that had characterized some parts of Northern society for many years previously.


Could this relentless barrage of hatred directed by Northerners against their Southern fellow citizens have perhaps had something to do with the secession impulse? That was the opinion of Horatio Seymour, Democratic governor of New York. In a public address he pointed to the enormity of making war on Southern fellow citizens who had always been exceptionally loyal Americans, but who had been driven to secession by New England fanaticism.


Secessionists were well aware that slavery was under no immediate threat within the Union. Indeed, some anti-secessionists, especially those with the largest investment in slave property, argued that slavery was safer under the Union than in a new experiment in government.


Advocates of the “slavery and nothing but slavery” interpretation also like to mention a speech in which Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens is supposed to have said that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The speech was ad hoc and badly reported, but so what? White supremacy was also the cornerstone of the United States. A law of the first Congress established that only white people could be naturalized as citizens. Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois forbade black people to enter the State and deprived those who were there of citizenship rights.


Instead of quoting two cherry-picked quotations, serious historians will look into more of the vast documentation of the time. For instance, in determining what the war was “about,” why not consider Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address, the resolutions of the Confederate Congress, numerous speeches by Southern spokesmen of the time as they explained their departure from the U.S. Congress and spoke to their constituents about the necessity of secession. Or for that matter look at the entire texts of the secession documents.


Our advocates of slavery causation practice the same superficial and deceitful tactics in viewing their side of the fight. They rely mostly on a few pretty phrases from a few of Lincoln’s prettier speeches to account for the winning side in the Great Civil War. But what were Northerners really saying?


I am going to do something radical. I am going to review what Northerners had to say about the war. Not a single Southern source, Southern opinion, or Southern accusation will I present. Just the words of Northerners (and a few foreign observers) on what the war was “about.”


Abraham Lincoln was at pains to assure the South that he intended no threat to slavery. He said he understood Southerners and that Northerners would be exactly like them living in the same circumstances. He said that while slavery was not a good thing (which most Southerners agreed with) he had no power to interfere with slavery and would not know what to do if he had the power. He acquiesced in a proposed 13th Amendment that would have guaranteed slavery into the 20th century. Later, he famously told Horace Greeley that his purpose was to save the Union, for which he would free all the slaves, some of the slaves, or none of the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself promised a continuance of slavery to States that would lay down their arms.


All Lincoln wanted was to prevent slavery in any territories, future States, which then might become Southern and vote against Northern control of the Treasury and federal legislation. From the anti-slavery perspective this is a highly immoral position. At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison said that restricting the spread of slavery was a false, politically motivated position. The best thing for the welfare of African Americans and their eventual emancipation was to allow them to spread as thinly as possible.


Delegation after delegation came to Lincoln in early days to beg him to do something to avoid war. Remember that 61% of the American people had voted against this great hero of democracy, which ought to have led him to a conciliatory frame of mind. He invariably replied that he could not do without “his revenue.” He said nary a word about slavery. Most of “his revenue” was collected at the Southern ports because of the tariff to protect Northern industry and most of it was spent in the North. Lincoln could not do without that revenue and vowed his determination to collect it without interruption by secession. He knew that his political backing rested largely on New England/New York money men and the rising power of the new industrialists of Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago who were aggressively demanding that the federal government sponsor and support them. The revenue also provided the patronage of offices and contracts for his hungry supporters, without which his party would dwindle away.


Discussing the reaction to secession, the New York Times editorialized: “The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North. We were divided and confused until our pockets were touched.” A Manchester, N.H., paper was one of hundreds of others that agreed, saying: “It is very clear that the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go.”


Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress officially declared that the war WAS NOT AGAINST SLAVERY but to preserve the Union. (By preserving the Union, of course, they actually meant not preserving the real Union but ensuring their control of the federal machinery.)


At the Hampton Roads peace conference a few months before Appomattox, Lincoln suggested to the Confederate representatives that if they ceased fighting then the Emancipation Proclamation could be left to the courts to survive or fall. Alexander Stephens, unlike Lincoln, really cared about the fate of the black people and asked Lincoln what was to become of them if freed in their present unlettered and propertyless condition. Lincoln’s reply: “Root, hog, or die.” A line from a minstrel song suggesting that they should survive as best they could. Lincoln routinely used the N-word all his life, as did most Northerners.


A statement in which Lincoln is said to favour voting rights for black men who were educated or had been soldiers has been shown to be fraudulent. Within a few days of his death he was still speaking of colonization outside the U.S.


The South, supposedly fighting for slavery, did not respond to any of these offers for the continuance of slavery. In fact, wise Southerners like Jefferson Davis realized that if war came it would likely disrupt slavery as it had during the first war of independence. That did not in the least alter his desire for the independence and self-government that was the birthright of Americans. Late in the war he sent a special emissary to offer emancipation if European powers would break the illegal blockade.


Saying that the South was fighting only to defend the evils of slavery is a deceitful back-handed way to suggest that, therefore the North was fighting to rid America of the evils of slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, secession did not necessarily require war against the South. That was a choice. Slavery had existed for over two hundred years and there was no Northern majority in favour of emancipation. Emancipation was not the result of a moral crusade against evil but a byproduct of a ruthless war of invasion and conquest. Not one single act of Lincoln and the North in the war was motivated by moral considerations in regard to slavery.


Even if slavery was a reason for secession, it does not explain why the North made a war of invasion and conquest on a people who only wanted to be let alone to live as they had always lived. The question of why the North made war is not even asked by our current historians. They assume without examination that the North is always right and the South is always evil. They do not look at the abundant Northern evidence that might shed light on the matter.


When we speak about the causes of war should we not pay some attention to the motives of the attacker and not blame everything on the people who were attacked and conquered? To say that the war was “caused” by the South’s defense of slavery is logically comparable to the assertion that World War II was caused by Poland resisting attack by Germany. People who think this way harbor an unacknowledged assumption: Southerners are not fellow citizens deserving of tolerance but bad people and deserve to be conquered. The South and its people are the property of the North to do with as they wish. Therefore no other justification is needed. That Leninist attitude is very much still alive judging by the abuse I receive in print and by e-mail. The abuse never discusses evidence, only denounces what is called “Neo-Confederate” and “Lost Cause” mythology. These are both political terms of abuse that have no real meaning and are designed to silence your enemy unheard.


Let us look at the U.S. Senate in February 1863. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, one of the most prominent of the Republican supporters of war against the South, has the floor. He is arguing in favour of a bill to establish a system of national banks and national bank currency. He declared that this bill was the most important business pending before the country. It was so important, he said, that he would see all the slaves remain slaves if it could be passed. Let me repeat this. He would rather leave all the slaves in bondage rather than lose the national bank bill. This was a few weeks after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.


What about this bill? Don’t be deceived by the terminology. So-called National Banks were to be the property of favoured groups of private capitalists. They were to have as capital interest-bearing government bonds at a 50% discount. The bank notes that they were to issue were to be the national currency. The banks, not the government, had control of this currency. That is, these favoured capitalists had the immense power and profit of controlling the money and credit of the country. Crony capitalism that has been the main feature of the American regime up to this very moment.


Senator Sherman’s brother, General Sherman, had recently been working his way across Mississippi, not fighting armed enemies but destroying the infrastructure and the food and housing of white women and children and black people. When the houses are burned, the livestock taken away or killed, the barns with tools and seed crops destroyed, fences torn down, stored food and standing crops destroyed, the black people will starve as well as the whites. General Sherman was heard to say: “Damn the niggers! I wish they were anywhere but here and could be kept at work.”
General Sherman was not fighting for the emancipation of black people. He was a proto-fascist who wanted to crush citizens who had the gall to disobey the government.

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The gracious Mrs. General Sherman agreed. She wrote her husband thus:

Not a word about the slaves.


As the war began, the famous abolitionist Theodore Weld declared that the South had to be wiped out because it is “the foe to Northern industry—to our mines, our manufactures, our commerce.” Nothing said about benefit to the slaves. The famous abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher enjoyed a European tour while the rivers of blood were flowing in America. Asked by a British audience why the North did not simply let the South go, Beecher replied, “Why not let the South go? O that the South would go! But then they must leave us their lands.”

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Then there is the Massachusetts Colonel who wrote his governor from the South in January 1862:

Seizing Southern resources was a common theme among advocates of the Union. Southerners were not fellow citizens of a nation. They were obstacles to be disposed of so Yankees could use their resources to suit themselves. The imperialist impulse was nakedly and unashamedly expressed before, during, and after the war.

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Charles Dickens, who had spent much time in the U.S. a few years before the war, told readers of his monthly magazine in 1862: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

Another British observer, John Stuart Mill, hoped the war would be against slavery and was disappointed. “The North, it seems,” Mill wrote, “have no more objections to slavery than the South have.”


Another European thinker to comment was Karl Marx. Like many later Lincoln worshippers, Marx believed that the French Revolution was a continuation of the American Revolution and Lincoln’s revolution in America a continuation of the French. He thought, wrongly, that Lincoln was defending the “labour of the emigrant against the aggressions of the slave driver.” The war, then, is in behalf of the German immigrants who had flooded the Midwest after the 1848 revolutions. Not a word about the slaves themselves. Indeed, it was the numbers and ardent support of these German immigrants that turned the Midwest from Democrat to Republican and elected Lincoln. It would seem that Marx, like Lincoln, wanted the land for WHITE workers.


Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, a reluctant Democratic supporter of the war, knew what it was all about: “Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery,” he said. Like all Northern opponents and reluctant supporters of Lincoln, he knew the war was about economic domination. As one “Copperhead” editor put it: the war was simply “a murderous crusade for plunder and party power.” “Dealing in confiscated cotton seems to be the prime activity of the army,” he added.

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Wall Street agreed and approved. Here is a private circular passed among bankers and brokers in late 1861:

It is not clear whether this is authentic or a satire, but it tells the truth whichever.

The libertarian Lysander Spooner, an abolitionist, called the Lincoln rule “usurpation and tyranny” that had nothing to do with a moral opposition to slavery. “It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.”


Here is Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American of the 19th century:

What better testimony is needed that emancipation was a by-product, not a goal, of a war of conquest. Let me repeat: emancipation was a by-product of the war, never a goal.


How about these curiosities from the greatest of Northern intellectuals, Emerson. He records in his journals: “But the secret, the esoteric of abolition—a secret, too, from the abolitionist—is, that the negro and the negro-holder are really of one party.” And again, “The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.” Emerson had previously predicted that African Americans were like the Dodo, incapable of surviving without care and doomed to disappear. Another abolitionist, James G. Birney, says: “The negroes are part of the enemy.”


Indeed a staple of Northern discourse was that black people would and should disappear, leaving the field to righteous New England Anglo-Saxons. My friend Howard White remarks: “Whatever his faults regarding slavery, the Southerner never found the existence of Africans in his world per se a scandal. That particular foolishness had its roots in the regions further North.”


In 1866, Boston had a meeting of abolitionists and strong Unionists. The speaker, a clergyman, compared the South to a sewer. It was to be drained of its present inhabitants and “to be filled up with Yankee immigration . . . and upon that foundation would be constructed a new order of things. To be reconstructed, the South must be Northernized, and until that was done, the work of reconstruction could not be accomplished.” Not a word about a role for African Americans in this program.


One of the most important aspects of the elimination of slavery is seldom mentioned. The absence of any care or planning for the future of black Americans. The Russian Czar pointed this out to an American visitor as a flaw that invalidated the fruits of emancipation. We could fill ten books with evidence of Northern mistreatment of black people during and after the war. Emancipation as it occurred was not a happy experience. To borrow Kirkpatrick Sale’s term, it was a Hell. I recommend Kirk’s book Emancipation Hell and Paul Graham’s work When the Yankees Come, which are available here.


I suspect many Americans imagine emancipation as soldiers in blue and freed people rushing into one another’s arms to celebrate the day of Jubilee. As may be proved from thousands of Northern sources, the Union solders’ encounter with the black people of the South was overwhelmingly hate-filled, abusive, and exploitive. This subject is just beginning to be explored seriously. Wrote one Northerner of Sherman’s men, they “are impatient of darkies, and annoyed to see them pampered, petted and spoiled.” Ambrose Bierce, a hard-fighting Union soldier for the entire war, said that the black people he saw were virtual slaves as the concubines and servants of Union officers.


Many black people took to the roads not because of an intangible emancipation but because their homes and living had been destroyed. They collected in camps which had catastrophic rates or mortality. The army asked some Northern governors to take some of these people, at least temporarily. The governors of Massachusetts and Illinois, Lincoln’s most fervid supporters, went ballistic. This was unacceptable. The black people would be uncomfortable in the North and much happier in the South, said the longtime abolitionist Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. Happier in the South than in Massachusetts?


What about those black soldiers in the Northern army, used mainly for labour and forlorn hopes like the Crater? A historian quotes a Northern observer of U.S. Army activities in occupied coastal Carolina in 1864. Generals declared their intention to recruit “every able-bodied male in the department.” Writes the Northern observer: “The atrocious impressments of boys of fourteen and responsible men with large dependent families, and the shooting down of negroes who resisted, were common occurrences.”


The greater number of Southern black people remained at home. They received official notice of freedom not from the U.S. Army but from the master who, when he got home from the Confederate army, gathered the people, told them they were free, and that they must work out a new way of surviving together.


Advocates of the war was “caused by slavery” say that the question has been settled and that any disagreement is from evil and misguided Neo-Confederates deceived by a “Lost Cause” myth.


In fact, no great historical question can ever be closed off by a slogan as long as we are free to think. Howard White and I recently put out a book about the war. Careful, well-supported essays, by 16 serious people. Immediately it appeared on Amazon, someone wrote in: “I’m so tired of the Lost Cause writing. Don’t believe the bullshit in this useless pamphlet.” He could not have had time to actually read the book. It can be dismissed unread because he has the righteous cause and we do not. This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.


But if you insist on a short answer solution as to what caused the war I will venture one. The cause of the greatest bloodletting in American history was Yankee greed and hatred. This is infinitely documented before, during, and after the war.

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Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!

There is an interesting little noted fact of African American history that would alter current standard views if it were ever to be properly recognised.  The U.S. African American population was in many measurable respects worse off fifty years after emancipation than it had been before the War Between the States.


The census of 1900 showed that the average life expectancy of black Americans had declined by 10 years from 1860.


This can best be explained by losses  in nutrition, health, and housing, and by unemployment,  over-work, crime, and vice. Several decades later, in the 1930s, former bondsmen interviewed for the Works Progress Administration showed nostalgia for a time when they had been well-fed, not required to struggle for survival, and had lots of down-time from work. This opinion was not universal, but it was substantial across the board.


The default position of American intelligentsia is that Southern white people are always the villains in any bad situation.  They will claim that the ex-slaves did not really mean what they said.  And anyway, the depressed condition of the black people after emancipation was caused by Southern oppression and discrimination.  The only fault of Northerners was that they had been deterred by Southern violence from carrying out the complete revolution for equality that should have been enforced. Exactly what the resulting situation would have been and whether it would have been better is not considered.


We might be encouraged to take a closer look at the whole matter of the nobility of emancipation.  It occurred in the worst possible way, by a destructive invading army. Southern leaders realised the challenge this would be for the mass of propertyless and uneducated freedmen and for society itself. Northern leaders basically did not care about the emancipated ones, leaning toward Lincoln’s solution:  “Root, hog, or die.”


To achieve better understanding it is also necessary to take another look at Reconstruction, the most lied-about era of American history. Not very long ago, historians of every affiliation except for some (not even all) Communists, agreed that Reconstruction was an orgy of oppression and looting carried out by bad leaders and was the worst sin in American history.


The Communist view is now mainstream:  the success of Reconstruction was prevented by violent Southerners determined to maintain white supremacy and economic privilege.  To revolutionaries, anybody who resists them is by definition guilty of any violence that occurs.  This is false in every aspect. It is assumed that Northern leaders had a deep intention to achieve equality for black Americans.  No such intention ever existed except in rhetoric.  The purpose of Reconstruction (as of the war) was to loot the South and use the black people as a tool to keep the Republican party in power.


The emancipators made only trivial  temporary provision for a portion of the dislocated  black people. There was and never had been any plan of the conquerors to deal with the consequences the immense revolution they had decreed.  The Republicans, as can be clearly shown in evidence, withdrew the Army from the South because with new western States they no longer needed the votes of Southern blacks and because the idealistic abolitionists were disgusted that the African Americans had not turned themselves into prim, industrious New Englanders as expected.  Also, the whole thing of military occupation and disfranchisement of whites  had become an obvious fraud when in  some States two different carpetbagger groups were calling for federal troops to support them against each other.


The Reconstructed state constitutions authorised public school systems.  Meaningless since all the funds were looted, as they were from railroad projects and other “improvements.”


What were Southern whites to do in this situation?  They had to deal with a long period of discriminatory economic laws, the destruction and dislocation of the war, military occupation, punitive taxes,  the looting of their scarce resources, a good deal of disorder,  and immense debt left by carpetbagger corruption.   They had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  There were more white sharecroppers by 1900 than black.  Actually, Southern whites were sympathetic to the blacks immediately after the war.  They had lived together a long time and there had been no revolts during the war.  Hostility was the product of Reconstruction more than of the war or emancipation.


Some black people achieved position as solid farmers, professional people, and businessmen.  They remained an accepted part of the South for a long time. They formed Christian communities that barely existed for those who were found in Northern ghettos in the 20th century. But the majority were not able to achieve an improved position. What the white South could have done for them in their own impoverished situation it did, in supporting public schools out of their own scarce resources and other civic actions.  Their remained much friendship and cooperation in private life and Southern leaders realized that uplifting of the blacks was necessary for the health of their society.


What happened in the South between the races in the late 1800s was greatly affected by the passing of the black and white generations who had known the old regime.  Postwar people had been raised in different circumstances without the personal connections of the Old South.  The increase of white supremacy violence and segregation, after the end of Reconstruction, was a response to, not a cause of, black deterioration.


The response of knowledgeable African American leaders of the time contradicts the Radical story of emancipation and Reconstruction. Hiram Revels, who held the Mississippi U.S. Senate seat once occupied by Jefferson Davis, wrote President Grant in 1875 that tension between the races would already have been resolved except for the carpetbaggers who were there to loot, and who left the black people with nothing except having been degraded by being used as political tools.  He was ready to collaborate with honourable white Southerners.


In a public speech Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American of the time, said that his people had no reason to revere Lincoln since everything he had done was in the interest of Northern whites without any real concern for the slaves, who had been left with nothing.


Paul Laurance Dunbar, the most gifted of all African American writers, in his late 1800s poetry regretted the loss of the good fraternal character of the old regime, which had not been entirely without merit, and lamented the deteriorated condition of his own people.


Two interesting books appeared with a similar view.


In 1886 John Wallace published  Carpetbag Rule in Florida, with the subtitle ThE
 Inside Workings of the Reconstruction of Civil Government in Florida After the Close of the Civil War. Wallace was born a slave.  During the war he crossed the line into Union- occupied eastern North Carolina and joined the Union Army.  The end of the war found him in Florida where he decided to settle.  He found early Reconstruction peaceful, a situation destroyed by Congressional Reconstruction and carpetbag rule.  He was active in Republican affairs and served as a Republican in the state senate.


Wallace recounts Republican politics blow by blow.  There were three factions of carpetbaggers.  The smallest, to which he belonged, formed around a governor who was something of a fanatic for reform but not corrupt and had a real concern for the freedmen.  The other two were competing groups of crooks who were interested only in the looting prospects of public office.  They never did anything for the freedmen except mobilise them to hate Southern whites. He has good things to say about the Southern conservatives.  They wanted to preserve their interests, of course, and to restore law and order, but they had no hostility to the freedmen and in political maneuvering always kept their word.


Another notable book is The America Negro:  What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become, published in 1901. The author, William Hannibal Thomas, was born free in Ohio and was well-educated, largely at his own initiative. He lost an arm serving as an officer of U.S. Colored Troops, wrote several books, and held U.S. consul posts in Africa. His book is a sermon to his fellows that their sad condition is largely their own fault and they must give up laziness and dissipation. His message was essentially the same as Booker T. Washington’s, and like that leader he has been called a traitor.


​We have two recent books that tell the truth, even better than the classic old works, about what happened to the South after the war.  Southern Reconstruction by Philip Leigh and Punished with Poverty by Ronald and Donald Kennedy.  If American scholarly discourse was normal these books would already have made an impression.  But the academy is now radicalized to the point that genuine new views are anathema.  Don’t expect Northerners any time soon, if ever, to give up their implicit assumption of superior virtue.