bblhd672 wrote:https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams
Were Confederate Generals Traitors?
My "Rewriting American History" column of a fortnight ago, about the dismantling of Confederate monuments, generated considerable mail. Some argued there should not be statues honoring traitors such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who fought against the Union. Victors of wars get to write the history, and the history they write often does not reflect the facts. Let's look at some of the facts and ask: Did the South have a right to secede from the Union? If it did, we can't label Confederate generals as traitors.
People who throw out the "traitor" label forget some salient facts.......
Salient Fact #1:
- Most of the generals of the Confederacy had fought alongside their Union colleagues in the Mexican-American war. By ANY definition, they were patriots right up until secession. For them, the salient fact wasn't that they hated the United States, it was that they were first and foremost sons of the states they came from, and they responded to the call of their states. In their view, they were being patriotic when they responded to that call, and it was their northern colleagues who were being UNpatriotic by prosecuting a war against sovereign states. Today, it is easy for us as armchair quarterbacks to reduce any war to a case of "who fired first?" to justify their cause. In the case of the Union, their view is that the Confederacy fired first at Fort Sumpter. In his excellent MUST READ Civil War Trilogy, historian Shelby Foote wrote of Jefferson Davis's actions in January of 1861 - months before the first battle of Fort Sumpter:
By now he [Jefferson Davis] was one of the acknowledged spokesmen of secession, though it had not always been so. By nature he was a moderate, with a deep devotion to the Union. He had been for compromise so long as he believed compromise was possible; he reserved secession as a last resort. Yet now they were at that stage. In a paper which he had helped to draft and which he had signed and sent as advice to his state in early December, his position had been explicit. “The argument is exhausted,” it declared. “All hope of relief in the Union … is extinguished.” At last he was for disunion, with a southern confederacy to follow.
During the twelve days since the secession of Mississippi he had remained in Washington, sick in mind and body, waiting for the news to reach him officially. He hoped he might be arrested as a traitor, thereby gaining a chance to test the right of secession in the federal courts. Now the news had been given him officially the day before, a Sunday, and he stayed to say goodbye. He had never doubted the right of secession. What he doubted was its wisdom. Yet now it was no longer a question even of wisdom; it was a question of necessity—meaning Honor.
The sovereign southern states insisted on preserving their sovereignty - which had always been the case for all 34 of the states during the first 90 odd years of the nation's existence. In any case, months passed between succession, and the attack on Fort Sumpter.
To a sovereign state which had realigned itself with a new union of states which would respect its sovereignty, the Union refusal to remove its troops from territory which the South viewed to be "foreign" to the Union was a provocation which could not go unanswered, and this new union, called the Confederate States of America, had an obligation to respond by force of arms to preserve its national integrity. But the attack on the fort was not something that happened just out of the blue. It happened within the context of a new federal refusal to continue recognizing the here-to-fore long-recognized sovereignty of South Carolina.
Salient Fact #2:
- Prior to the first Civil War (yes, I used the word "first" deliberately), the country wasn't known by its own citizens - northern OR southern - as THE United States; it was known as THESE United States. The implications of that with regard to how U.S. citizens viewed state sovereignty are enormous. Ante-bellum, they viewed the nation as a federation of sovereign states which were united under a common Constitution, which limited the federal gov't to issues such as the national defense and regulation of interstate commerce.
Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to the Danbury Baptists was a reflection of that fact. Connecticut -a northern state - under questionable wisdom had exercised its sovereign right as a sovereign state to establish Congregationalism as the official state religion. The Baptists of Danbury had written Jefferson to complain that their religious rights were being trampled. His famous response was essentially to say "I feel your pain and I agree that they shouldn't have done that, but the federal gov't can have no part in deciding religious matters".....hence the famously misinterpreted by modern Americans term of "separation of church and state".
In an environment in which the federal gov't had, for all practical purposes, dispensed with the notion of state sovereignty, southern generals and politicians may well have viewed their northern counterparts as the treasonous ones, whose treason forced the south to seek relief from that treason by seceding from the union.
Now, reasonable people can debate all day long whether or not the resulting
new post-bellum nation (THE United States) was a better outcome than the ante-bellum federation of sovereign states (THESE United States), but the question of who fired first becomes moot when the real problem was a very deliberate federal decision to no longer recognize the sovereignty of a state. My personal inclination is to believe that, so long as the federal gov't acted constitutionally, we were better off.......but the federal gov't hasn't behaved constitutionally in most matters since at least 1865, possibly earlier than that. The federal gov't has, and continues to, ignore the limits the Constitution places on its powers, and to usurp and deny the sovereignty that the Constitution affirms to the states. So although I would prefer that we continue as THE United States under a due regard for the Constitution, I increaingly believe that this may no longer be possible in the not too distant future......which is why I make reference above to the
first Civil War. That said, intellectual honesty compels me to understand the situation in 1861
as it was understood by the people living then, rather than through the eyes of modern revisionists. We cynically say that the victors get to write the history, and to some degree that is certainly true. But "get to write the history" does not mean that the written history is accurate.
I cannot recommend Shelby Foote's Civil War Triology too highly. It is a masterpiece, and one of the reasons it is so darn good is that it
humanizes rather than
demonizes BOTH sides to the conflict. Because he refuses to portray
either side's participants as monsters, it is as neutral a telling of the
actual history.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
