It’s hard to escape William Faulkner’s observation that, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The past seems particularly undead these days. A few Georgians once again are pushing to secede from the union just as the new film “Lincoln” reminds us of the president murdered for trying to preserve the same union.
And I just finished reading “The New Mind of the South,” a book by my former Journal-Constitution colleague Tracy Thompson. It will be published next March and updates the search for Southern identity started 70 years ago by Wilbur Cash’s “The Mind of the South.”
Thompson, who grew up in College Park across from railroad tracks destroyed by Sherman’s army, probes deeply and uncomfortably into the Southern psyche and explores the conflicts, experiences and attitudes that distinguish and weigh upon Southerners.
She delves into some touchy issues, such as whether Southerners really have a distinct culture (yes), how and whether immigrants here are true Southerners (more than you may think). Most incendiary of all, Thompson devotes much of the book to what she calls “The Big Lie.” The lie, she argues, is the myth that the Civil War was caused by a respectable dispute over states’ rights rather than the desire of some Southerners to continue owning human beings.
The South, she argues, is haunted by its conflicting understanding of history. Embracing the truth, she suggests, is essential to making peace with our past and moving on.
Thompson, who says she was raised with the “states’ rights” interpretation, believes the South has suffered for its self-deception. “The stories we believe have a huge role in determining how we live in the present,” she writes.
If you accept the rational sounding states’ rights justification – that the sole cause was the federal government’s constitutional overreach – then it makes it easier to support Jim Crow, resist integration and accept that a state can set its own immigration policy. Thompson didn’t mention metro Atlanta’s doomed T-SPLOST, but she suggests Southerners may be predisposed to oppose such regional aspirations because of an ingrained mistrust of any government but the smallest.
If you believe the South was moved to war to assert its right to make unfettered policy, then it’s easy to understand why 25,000 Georgians would petition to part from Washington.
Thompson believes many if not most Southerners believe in “The Big Lie.” And she blames Southern schools, which for generations kept the myth alive. “Today’s texts simply strive not to offend; they don’t perpetrate the Lost Cause myth, but they don’t do much to correct it either.”
Georgia schools even today allow students to conclude that the war was caused by both state’s rights and slavery.
On what led to war, Georgia can speak for itself. Secessionists won a narrow a majority of support in early 1861 (among white, male voters, it must be noted.) But the decision to withdraw came at a state convention convened to consider the matter.
On Jan. 29, 1861, the convention leaders explained their decision. They decried a decade of federal interference against the expansion of “African slavery” into non-slave-holding states. They expressed outrage that the new Lincoln administration and the recently formed Republican Party were no more than veiled abolitionists. Toward the end of their screed, they cut to the chase: “Why? Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property. …” That “property” being men, women and children.
The waters also have been muddied in the South because we tend to confuse what caused the war with why our ancestors fought.
James M. Roughton, my great-great grandfather, worked a farm in Tennessee. Like most Southerners, he owned no slaves. Yet, in early 1861 he worried that Northern armies were poised to invade. “We hear yesterday’s report, but do not know if it be true or not, that Lincoln is on his way to take his seat next Monday,” he wrote in an angst-filled letter to my great grandfather Thomas, who was in Arkansas en route to Texas. “(Lincoln) is guarded by (Gen. Winfield) Scott, and they are going to send them to coerce the South as soon as he takes his seat.”
At 37, he enlisted two months later. His outfit fought from Manassas to Appomattox.
He fought to protect his homeland, but that’s not what moved his political leaders to send him to war. If we can’t appreciate the difference, then we can’t understand who we are.
