What’s a Historian to Do?

In a continuing conversation over at Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory, a commenter offers the following observation:

Indeed, as more people turn to the internet for information, the more these black Confederate sites have an impact. Obviously we can’t control the content of these sites (nor should we), so the question becomes if it’s worth fighting them. So it’s important to understand who it is that goes to these sites, and what it is they pick up from it (how many people that see it believe it? and to what degree?), and most importantly to your point about education: how many of these people who visit such sites are even open to education? Or do they have a conclusion in mind already and only find what they already believe (which means they will find a forum to do that through, no matter what, online or not)? These questions require evaluation as suggested by Professor Orr, in order to answer the question of whether it’s worth rebutting these sites (i.e. are their audiences even open to our interpretation? and thus, is it worth our resources? or are we better off spending those resources elsewhere?) — which gets precisely to the heart of your question: “it’s a fair question to ask as to whether they are passing up opportunities to educate others through online sources and conceding the field to this so-called ‘fringe.’ ” Is it worth the fight?

A larger point (and not speaking directly to your point, but related): in my opinion, the more we argue with them on their terms, the more we create that there is a “debate” and legitimize their position, and the more we lose the fight, because unfortunately the people who want to believe this black Confederate stuff would accuse us of ignoring evidence, etc. This is always their accusation, no matter how strong your argument is. Thus, my new approach is this: ok, fine, so 10 zillion African Americans fought for the Confederacy, but really that’s irrelevant to why the Confederate States of America was established as a nation (i.e. to protect the institution of slavery), if we look at any/all of its foundational documents. In other words, it is impossible to be accused of ignoring their evidence, because I am acknowledging their evidence, and then refocusing the question to the heart of the matter (since I think the number of black Confederates is irrelevant to why the CSA was established). Unfortunately, I think by arguing on the numbers of black Confederates, we argue on their terms (i.e. implicitly acknowledging the number of black Confederates who enlisted is connected to the question about how important slavery was to the Confederacy). I think the answer is irrelevant: whether 0 black Confederates, 10 of them, or a million of them, what does not change is this: all the forming documents of the CSA explicitly state why the CSA is formed. Period. This has absolutely nothing to do (and cannot be changed) with the number of black Confederates that “fought for” the Confederacy. Thus, I think it’s time we don’t get sucked into the neo-Confederate Red Herring paradigm of the importance/relevancy of the number of black Confederates, but it’s time we simply point out the CSA’s foundational documents.

I find this position problematic, and it frames the choices as either/or.  Either you contest the evidence someone offers (because you can demonstrate it’s false) or you set that aside and say, “so what?”

Readers of this blog already know that I have long ago raised the “so what?” argument, so I see nothing original in that.  But I think that simply going directly to “so what?” while leaving the evidence uncontested as the approach is simply wrong-headed.  Moreover, isn’t simply accepting the evidence as true a way to legitimize the evidence offered?  I’m very careful to say when I offer “so what” that the evidence is very much contested, but, for the sake of argument, I’ll stipulate it as entered into the record.

Inherent in this commenter’s claim is an accusation: replying to certain people gives them legitimacy and recognition, while ignoring it will leave it to die.  I’ve raised this question before, and there is a counterargument.  The notion that people who contest the claims concerning black Confederates are responsible for the fact that there is an argument (and one that some people speculate may distract professional Civil War historians from getting their own messages across) seems to me mistaken in its import, and I could with equal justice raise it about any issue.

I truly doubt that battling proponents of what’s becoming known in some circles as the myth of Black Confederates will cause many of them to change their minds.  As Andy Hall has argued, it’s an article of faith with them: good old “BorderRuffian”, for example, has left open the notion that one need not have served in the military to be a veteran (how do those of you who are veterans feel about that denigration of your service?).  But there are other audiences, other publics, other consumers of online information.  If we don’t contest the factual basis of these claims, the NPS finds itself supporting historical falsehoods; Virginia’s fourth graders are fed inaccurate history; and people turning to the internet for information will find fraud presented as fact, with nothing to contest it.

Contesting both the narrative and the supposed evidence adduced in support of these claims is what historians do all the time.  Should we let photographic forgeries and false claims go uncontested?  Would that be a good rule for historians to follow, period?  I don’t think so.  Oh, I don’t think we should spend every waking hour in a vigilant reactive mode, and I’ve seen idiots suggest, for example, that not contesting everything that falls out of the mouths of political candidates serves as a tacit endorsement of that candidate.

The commenter on Kevin’s blog later offered this observation:

Moreover, you are missing the big picture if you get sucked into arguing over numbers with them. These people argue for black Confederates why? What is their larger point? Their larger point is to say that slavery was not important to the CSA. Thus, while you are busy arguing on their terms on their paradigm and creating a forum of debate so these people are heard (instead of letting them just talk to each other), I would rather get to the heart of the matter and point out the irrefutable official CSA documentation that explicitly states why the CSA was formed. To me, that undermines their larger point, and thus defeats their argument.

Put another way, the “number” of black Confederates is simply the means to an end — the end/goal being that the CSA was not a nation fighting for preserving the institution slavery. So, I like to go for the goal, because once again, they will simply say to you that you are denying their evidence and put you in some liberal conspiracy or something — but if you acknowledge them and calm them down, and then show your own evidence in return (evidence that gets to the heart of the matter), you will defeat their argument another way.

Again, I’ve already raised the same point before, but I think this tactic is miscast as an act of persuasion directed at the person who believes in the Black Confederate story as an article of faith.  You may come away from this confrontation believing that you have defeated an argument, but how so?  Certainly the person with whom you are arguing doesn’t make that admission if that person is already committed to a position.  The only way any of that matters is when an audience eager to learn and open to discussion wants to weight the merits of various arguments, and one way to undermine the Black Confederate narrative is to undermine its evidence and logic (for example, if there were so many Black Confederates, why was not mention made of them in the debates over enlisting blacks in the winter of 1864-65?  Are you really going to tell me Robert E. Lee was not aware of their existence?). If one confines oneself simply to saying so what, then one’s given away a lot of history, and the presenter of the Black Confederate tale will simply dismiss you as “politically correct” and walk away, declaring that you had nothing … NOTHING … to say about their evidence, leaving the audience to scratch their heads.  Counter evidence, logic, and implications, and then you may be getting somewhere, or at least that’s what I think.  

What do you think?

Constructing the Other’s Sense of History

One of the things I find most interesting about discussions about Civil War history is the tendency of some participants to construct accounts of what they believe “the other side” thinks.  This exercise in strawman architecture often serves as a prelude to the speaker’s decision to reveal truth.  It’s essential for the flow of the argument that claims must be made about what “the other side” believes in order to knock it down.  It helps if one either neglects evidence altogether or is extremely selective in crafting an account of what ‘the other side” believes.

This practice is not limited to discussions on various forums, although those forums usually see the most simplistic renderings of the practice.  One of my favorites is the claim that certain people believe the North fought the Civil War to free the slaves.  Any time you hear this claim, you can expect a response that shows that such was not the case.  Historians often do the same thing in setting up their own books by presenting a simplified version of the present state of scholarship, a presentation designed to show that there’s a problem which only this new study can address and resolve.  And sometimes people go a little to far in setting up these strawmen.  I recall reviewing a book about the Mugwumps in which the author singled me out, claiming that I so despised Henry Adams that I had called him a “pompous little ass”; I reminded the author in the published review that it was Henry’s own brother, Charles Jr., who so characterized his brother.

Oops.

It is with this in mind that I offer to you the following claim and solicit your reaction.

“America may well be the only country in the world to have experienced full-scale modern warfare upon its territory but then, as a matter of national identity, to have failed to establish a coherent narrative explanation.”

In my opinion, this is flat wrong. There is a “coherent narrative“.

Here is the dominant “coherent narrative“.

The story of the American nation is the story of a struggle between the True America and the Evil Other (the South).

The True Nation had to compromise with the Evil Other in order to establish American independence at all.  Finally the Evil Other became so hateful and aggressive that the True Nation had to defend itself in the Civil War.  If it had not, popular self-government would have disappeared entirely from the earth.  

The True Nation won, but out of a misguided mercy, failed adequately to force the Evil Other to convert to True Americanism during the Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Nevertheless True America was strong enough afterwards to control the US national institutions.

The unregenerate Evil Other South, however, has never given up its perversity, and continues to live out its Nazi-like ways.

That’s it. It’s pretty close to the way Lincoln described the war …

Enjoy. 

Someone’s Missing …

I’m sure many of you have seen the following commercial, celebrating the leadership of the United States Army:

Note who’s not there.

If memory is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering, it is also as much about excluding as it is about including.  So where’s Ulysses S. Grant?  Where’s William T. Sherman?  Where’s Joshua L. Chamberlain?

Okay, when it comes to Chamberlain, I jest … although one could argue that as a citizen soldier, he stands there with Theodore Roosevelt.

Look, I can accept that perhaps a picture of Winfield Scott would not cut it given the message, and viewers would not even know who Zachary Taylor or John J. Pershing might be.  But it was under Ulysses S. Grant that the United States Army first raised Regular Army units that recruited black soldiers on a deliberate basis, and I would place Grant above MacArthur when it comes to embodying how we believe the military should function in American society.

Oh, I’m pretty sure I know why the US Army is tiptoeing around its Civil War heritage.  However, let’s remember this: Ulysses S. Grant was general in chief of the armies of the United States, and the nation’s first four-star general (at a time when people have retroactively awarded additional rank, it would seem that Grant might be awarded another star).  Why doesn’t the US Army want to cite him as a leader of whom it could be proud?

Black Confederates and Birthers

If you’ve glanced at today’s headlines, you’ll notice that President Barack Obama has released documentation that would seem to put to rest, once and for all, the question of where he was born (and thus his constitutional eligibility to hold the office he occupies).  At a time when it would seem incumbent on all responsible political leaders to address the challenges confronting the United States, the resurgence of chatter about the president’s place of birth from some folks who do not always impress me as serious about political discussion or the state of the nation threatened once more to serve as an irritating distraction, a nuisance to the president, and not necessarily welcome news to those Republicans who realize how poorly the birther claim plays among voters that the Grand Old Party must attract in order to mount a serious challenge to Obama’s reelection bid.

What if the Confederacy Had Won? A Counterfactual Contemplation

One of the more interesting counterfactual exercises open to people interested in the era of the American Civil War is what would have happened had the Confederacy prevailed.  It is worth thinking about. Part of such a counterfactual exercise would be to define the moment at which the Confederacy prevailed in securing its independence, because what follows depends on when that moment occurs.  For example, the story’s far different if the United States decided to accept Confederate independence in March 1861 than if Confederate independence is secured as the result of war-weariness and a negotiated peace four years later.  The story would differ if you chose the Confederate counteroffensive of 1862 or the summer and fall of 1863.  So, if you are going to ask, “What if the Confederacy had won?”, first you must determine when you would have that event happen.

That said, I wonder whether in the long term the Confederacy would have welcomed the consequences of independence. 

Was Secession Constitutional?

One of the questions sure to spark a sharp debate is the question of whether secession was constitutional at the time of the secession crisis of 1860-61.  Yes, I know there’s an argument on whether secession’s constitutional today, but, frankly, that’s a different argument, given a few events such as Texas v. White (1869).  To this day, however, people flatly declare that secession is or is not constitutional, followed by comments that suggest that they question the sanity if not the intelligence of anyone who holds a contrary view.

As a historian, what’s important to me is that Americans in 1860-61 disagreed over whether secession was constitutional.  Some people said yes, some people said no.  There had been much discussion of this issue ever since the framing of the Constitution itself, and no one emerged with an argument that was satisfactory to all. 

Some Advice for Modern Day Secession Advocates

Over the last several years there’s been quite a revival in the use of the concept of secession as one way to address various problems.  While some people claim (with a great deal of support) that the claim for a constitutional right of secession was rejected by the Supreme Court in 1869, and others say the issue was resolved through force of arms (an argument that to me asserts that might makes right), still others endorse the concept.  Moreover, the concept is not restricted to white southerners, although it does seem to attract them in disproportionate numbers, including those who would like to create a separate southern nation.

So Your Ancestor Fought For the Union …

Some time ago, in the comments space of a post that explored the meaning of having had ancestors fight for the Confederacy for some folks, a contributor to the comment section suggested that it would be a good idea to explore the meaning of having an ancestor fight for the Union.

Two of my direct ancestors fought for the Union, also known, by the way, as the United States.  One served as a drummer boy in the 23rd Pennsylvania, while the other served in the 5th and 146th New York — all three were Zouave outfits, thus establishing a tradition of sharp and snappy dressing for descendants.  The drummer boy signed up in 1861, while the New Yorker signed up in the summer of 1862 and joined the 5th New York in the wake of Second Manassas, where it had suffered heavy losses defending John Pope’s left flank against James Longstreet’s devastating assault.  His first chance for action came at Shepherdstown, just a few days after Antietam.  The drummer boy was captured at Stone House Mountain, Virginia, in September 1863, by none other than Mosby’s men, but escaped; he mustered out on September 8, 1864.  The New Yorker served until the end of the war, transferring to the 146th New York during Chancellorsville.

I have visited several of the battlefields where both ancestors saw action (although one might want to qualify that in the case of the drummer boy).  For the New Yorker, that includes being among one of the last men to recross the Rappahannock after Fredericksburg; defending Little Round Top right in front of the Warren statue; and charging across Saunders Field in the Wilderness.  The 23rd Pennsylvania was on Culp’s Hill, although it appears to have moved between several positions during Gettysburg.  Outside of that, however, I can’t tell you much about their service, what they believed, and so on.  After the war the New Yorker spent some time in Florida before returning north, and, as he was there after the end of Reconstruction, I would not necessarily count him as a carpetbagger, although the family seems to have voted Republican in later generations.

Now, given what I know about the Civil War, I can speculate as to motives for joining the army on the part of these two fellows, but, lacking any other documentation, that’s as far as I can go.  Nor can I infer much about their politics outside of what I know about how political affiliation tends to be passed down from generation to generation (my grandmother adored Theodore Roosevelt, whom she met, and so I’d suspect that her roots were Republican, and that’s where we find these ancestors).  So, for me, the disconnect is obvious.  Any effort I made to project certain interpretations of what the war was about by relying on the story of these two ancestors would tell us more about me than about them.  Others may have more information about their ancestors.

In any case, the question that comes to mind is whether having ancestors who served in the Union army materially affects how I view the Civil War and Reconstruction, and I’d have to say no.  Rather, I view the fact of their service as separate and distinct from matters of motivation, causation, and meaning.  I can take pride and interest in their service without having that affect what I have to say about the Civil War era.

What about you?

Civil Warriors Greatest Hits: From Williamsport to Warrenton

(this post first appeared on Civil Warriors on May 15, 2006)

I’m sure that by now you’ve heard of the complaints that we have too many books on too few campaigns on the Civil War. How many more Gettysburg overviews can we stomach? [One more, I hope.] Moreover, too many campaign histories proceed on predictable tracks, with the big picture rarely changing, or changing in ways that appear to be as outrageous as they are novel.

There are some understudied areas, to be sure.

Debating DiLorenzo: Worshipping Lincoln and American Exceptionalism

In a 2008 interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo had this to say about why people worship Lincoln:

LAMB: Why, from your perspective, do you think that people are deifying him unnecessarily?

DILORENZO: Well, there’s sort of an interesting history of that. After the war, after Lincoln was assassinated, the New England clergy began with the deification. I have in my files, in my research files, an old magazine article that has a picture of Abe Lincoln with angel’s wings ascending into the sky in an open tomb at the bottom of the picture and this was the sort of thing that went on in the immediate years after the Civil War.