The "Good Old Rebel" at the Heart of the Radical Right

illustrations by Nate Beaty

on july 4, 1867, Augusta, Georgia's newspaper, the Daily Constitutionalist, published the words to a new song that seemed to reflect the bitterness felt by many white southerners following the Confederate defeat. The paper printed the song's title as "O! I'm a Good Old Rebel" above a spiteful dedication to Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionist congressman from Pennsylvania. It also provided the instructive subtitle "A Chant to the Wild Western Melody 'Joe Bowers,'" letting readers know they should sing the lyrics to the minor-keyed folk tune to give "Good Old Rebel" a mixture of melancholy and menace. The paper did not include an author attribution, but given the first-person perspective, the unpolished vernacular, and the tone, it appeared that a recalcitrant Confederate veteran had penned the lyrics. This anonymous author seemed to cling to his identity as an unrepentant traitor who twists failed rebellion into victimhood. He begins, "O I'm a good old Rebel, / Now that's just what I am; / For this 'Fair Land of Freedom' / I do not care at all," with the italicized "at all" censoring an obviously rhyming but omitted "damn."¹

The next four verses took the denunciations of the United States even further. "Good Old Rebel" inventories all of the nation's founding documents and symbols that he hates, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the US flag, as well as the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency created in 1865 to implement the plans of Reconstruction and help formerly enslaved African Americans transition to liberty. The author casts himself as a victim of postwar

oppression while claiming he would like to "kill some mo'" US soldiers. In the final verse, he pledges to never accept Reconstruction, claiming, "And I don't want no pardon, / For what I was and am; / I won't be reconstructed. / And I don't care a cent" [another omitted "damn"].²

Flash forward to the twenty-first century. Dozens of YouTube videos of "Good Old Rebel" have logged hundreds of thousands of plays for professional and amateur renditions of the song. Viewers from all over the world often leave pro-Confederate, pro-secession comments. These YouTube users, veiled in the anonymity that social media affords, feel a connection to "Good Old Rebel" and the imagined South that it summons, a South of continual rebellion against an allegedly oppressive federal government. They hear a kinship born of antigovernment resentment, authenticated with grammatical errors and familiar themes of political resistance. The song creates a space and a soundtrack for sympathetic listeners to perform what they imagine as their truest selves without the propriety of normative US patriotism. Hearing their views echoed in such an old song injects a bit of nineteenth-century popular culture into the political framework of the modern radical Right and affirms their politics in the here and now. It validates their feelings.³

The irony is that "Good Old Rebel" is not real—not exactly. "Good Old Rebel" started as a joke. Innes Randolph, a journalist, poet, and descendant of a prominent Virginia family, wrote those words, born partly out of his experiences as a Confederate soldier and partly as a means to lampoon poorly educated, working-class white southerners. Yet Randolph's verses leaked into circulation for decades after the war as an anonymous and, some believed, authentic folk song. This process of dissemination largely erased Randolph's attempt at humor and projected his personal rancor onto poor white southerners, many of whom had been reluctant to fight for the slaveholder's secession during the war.⁴

The fact that "Good Old Rebel" blurred the line between satire and sincerity so well meant that generations of audiences found malleability within the song's meaning. Some have taken the lyrics to heart. Some hear the song as a curiosity that seems too over-the-top to be serious. Still others find an attraction to the song's nihilism wrapped in romantic imaginings of the Confederate foot soldier. The...