The Lost Cause, Again

The Doc is doubtless even now descending from his ice-encrusted New Hampshire eyrie, part of his progress to the sunny plains of the South, where he will eventually arrive at Washington, DC to sample the delights of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

I can tell you though, as I am now in those sunny plains myself here in the Athens of Virginia, that it is pretty darn cold here as well. And I am not all that enthusiastic about the AHA, though it will be nice to see the Doc and other compadres. It will mean that the entire company of Dr. Curmudgeon will be gathered together in DC...we will have to have Dr. Potomac foot the bill at some suitable restaurant.

In light of the AHA meeting, I can promise you a profusion of historical blogging, and here's the first of several.

In the last week or so, there has been a magnificent barrage of essays dealing with the "Lost Cause" myth of the Confederacy. The most substantial of these was by Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard. Entitled "When Lincoln Came to Richmond: Dispatches from an unlikely culture war" it is a hilarious and pointed piece of reportage on the controversies surrounding the placement of a statue commemorating Lincoln's visit to Richmond shortly after its capture by the Union Army.

Sponsored by the historical memorabilia equivalent of the Franklin Mint, the "United States Historical Society", the statue was resolutely opposed by the Army of Northern Virginia Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. They enlisted the help of a libertarian economist named Thomas DiLorenzo, author of a book entitled The Real Lincoln which like most books with "Real" in the title has a very loose affiliation with reality.

Ferguson's essay (and do read the whole, lengthy thing) culminates with a depiction of the Sons of Confederate Veterans baying for the blood of the American Caesar, and a "professional" conference uptown at the Virginia Historical Society that covered Lincoln's legacy. He describes the panel thusly:

Harold Holzer, a specialist in Lincolniana from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, used to write speeches for Mario Cuomo. William Lee Miller, an ethics professor from the University of Virginia, was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and later worked for Lyndon Johnson. The third panelist, Ronald C. White, is dean of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, which is a self-explanatory job title.

It's no surprise, then, that the Lincoln who emerged from their discussion was a cross between Adlai Stevenson and Mario Cuomo, if both had gone to San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Going back downtown to watch the unveiling of the statue, he runs into one of the unreconstructed Virginians:

I found Leak in the line of protesters along the driveway, dressed festively in a top hat and a cutaway morning coat over his polo shirt and khakis. His signs showed the professional Kinko's touch: "No Honor for War Criminals," and "Jefferson Davis was Our President." A friend next to him held another sign: "Your Hero Killed Five of My Ancestors." Behind us, a few of the Sons began singing "Dixie."

"And how was the love-in at the Historical Society?" Leak asked. "Did you learn about the greatness of the great man?"

"They think he was a wimp," I said.

Leak looked away, then back at me. "Jesus," he said. "Even I don't think he was a wimp."

And then, the statue is unveiled! Naturally it is sentimental shlock:

"It's so small!" said a lady next to me. And it was--though life-sized, it looked smaller than life, diminutive almost. Lincoln sits tilted forward on a bench with a faraway look in his eyes. Tad is next to him, looking up expectantly, presumably waiting for his father to say something. The effect is supposed to be contemplative, but really it looks as if son has caught dad puzzling through a senior moment. ("Four score and . . . and what? . . . damn! . . . four score and . . .") The bronze bench on which they sit extends on either side, leaving space for tourists to pose for pictures, and soon the statue was engulfed by the crowd, as everyone jostled to get close.

What Ferguson captures beautifully is how both the lunatic Lost Cause fringe and the (non-historian) professional academics are both operating within the same context of historical knowing. Both sides practice advocacy history. They both willfully project their ideologies and context upon a historical figure. Whether they admit it or not, they find a history incapable of being truly known in all its variety and puzzling contradictions to be useful, eminently useful, to their political goals and their passions of the moment.

Particularly fascinating is the continuing "Road to Damascus" experience that people describe to Ferguson. They often tell him that they used to believe the conventional story of the Civil War, but then they found out (trumpets in the distance) the real story. It's much like the Park Ranger that Thomas Hibbs describes in his new essay on touring Ford's Theater, The House that Booth Built. Tipping his hat to Ferguson's piece, Hibbs describes the Ranger as follows:

Suffering from the crudest of childhood educations, our Ranger confessed that he had been taught in grade school that Lincoln was the great emancipator and that Booth was crazy. He then proceeded to a laundry list of Lincoln offenses — suspending habeas corpus , refusing to release prisoners of war, and causing the number of the dead to far eclipse the number on display at the Vietnam Memorial. Each of these accusations was preceded by a rhetorical "Did you know...?" and followed by the exclamation, "Nobody told me that!" No mention here of the unprecedented historical context of civil war, of the constitutional crisis precipitated by the threat of secession, of the opposition from the North to Lincoln's plans of postwar restraint toward the south, or of the possibility that Lincoln was exercising political prudence in his handling of the issue of slavery.

No history, in other words, since without contemporary context you have no history. As Hibbs writes further:

Having slipped from one crude conception of Lincoln to its polar opposite, from the grips of one shallow myth to another, our Ranger had no time for the complexities of history. Instead, he busied himself with reviving the memory of Booth. Booth, we were assured, was not insane; he was a successful actor, who had been provoked by Lincoln's misdeeds. Indeed, he never planned to kill Lincoln even after the war, until Lincoln had a band play Dixie at a public ceremony commemorating the end of the war. "Lincoln shouldn't have done that," our Ranger thundered. "Can you guess who was in the audience that day?" Again, we have a series of partial truths now peddled as the real truth in place of the mythic truth of this man's grade-school education.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, sure that the Park Service is behind an insidious plot to destroy the "real history" of the Confederacy, should breathe a little easier. Partial truths appeal to everyone, regardless of their uniform, race, color, or creed.

And so no acolytes of the Lost Cause will be paying much careful attention to Mac Owens' review of the historical framework of the movie Cold Mountain. Following up on his excellent review of Gods and Generals, Owens declares Cold Mountain to be the anti-Gods and Generals, complete with Southerners who support the Union, a South tortured by war, a Confederate Army plagued by desertion, a South engaging in its own internal civil war.

Such an analysis, alas, is only interesting to those who want to read history. From the sound of it, there don't seem to be too many out there.