Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History

11 Histories

11 Histories Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four Is there nothing about the South that is immune from the disintegrating effect of nationalism and the pressure for conformity? . . . There is only one thing that I can think of, and that is its history. . . . I mean . . . the collective experience of the Southern people. It is in just this respect that the South remains the most distinctive region of the country. —C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History So what is left? A region that is still burying its Civil War dead. Since the 1920s, southern writers, William Faulkner in particular, have demonstrated that the creation of a new perspective would be difficult. The old view was corrupt and corrupted; the new version of modern America lacked spiritual and social conscience. Like Will Barrett in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman (1966), the southerner is either fixated upon the past and therefore immobilized by it, or is a total amnesiac and therefore destructive. As Percy asked in another novel, Lancelot (1977), ‘‘What is worse, to die with Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville or to live with Johnny Carson in Burbank?’’1 For some, and their numbers are not as small as one would think, the old myths are still operative. When outsiders note that southerners are still 298 Histories 299 fighting the Civil War, they are not just referring to the small but vocal coterie who gather like relics of ancient clans at Sons of Confederate Veterans conclaves, battle reenactments, or meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, not so much to learn history as to repeat it. These and more private memorialists scarcely view their commemorations and remembrances as historical artifacts. The war and its legacies are living witness to their lives and those of their ancestors, real or imagined. It is all around them, living and breathing. Southern writer Rick Bass explained how the war imprints itself on the contemporary Mississippi landscape: ‘‘I don’t care if it was a hundred and twenty years ago, these things still last and that is really no time at all, not for a real war like that one, with screaming and pain. The trees absorb the echoes of the screams and cries and humiliations. Their bark is only an inch thick between then and now: the distance between your thumb and forefinger. The sun beating down on us now saw the flames and troops’ campfires then, and in fact the warmth from those flames is still not entirely through traveling to the sun. The fear of the women: you can still feel it, in places where it was strong.’’2 It is not difficult during an average week to pick up a southern newspaper and see history’s battles unfold. Mostly they are fought in the letters to the editor. The correspondence mixes combativeness, defensiveness, self-righteousness , and direct or indirect references to the Civil War—all familiar characteristics of a traditional South neither gone nor forgotten, but waning nonetheless. A Charlotte native opined that ‘‘many Northerners are now experiencing a resolve by Southerners to no longer back down from their repeated attacks on our way of life. The battle lines being drawn here have nothing to do with the War Between the States, but rather with a determination to maintain our cultural identity.’’ Another Charlotte resident adopted the same tone, complaining that northerners ‘‘seem far too willing to remind me who won the Civil War. The War for Southern Independence has long since been over—and we’re painfully aware of its outcome!’’ But it isn’t over, and he, for one, is still fighting.3 Northerners, especially transplants, find such declarations a tad ridiculous, which stirs the vitriol of southerners even more. Responses display an exasperation that such an ancient conflict continues to preoccupy southerners, and, besides, they ought to be thankful for the migration of northerners, as it has contributed significantly to southern prosperity and intellectual advancement . Neither of these suggestions is calculated to make a positive imprint on the mind of the southerner. ‘‘I’ve had it,’’ wrote one exasperated trans- 300 Still Fighting the Civil War plant from the West Coast to Charlotte. ‘‘Why is it so hard for the people around here to get on with life? Every time I read the paper I’m...