Excuse Me? Who Doesn’t Know the History?

A post in the “Skewing Southern History Series”

I recently published my sixth fiction novel, Honor’s Banner, a sequel to my post-Civil War Gothic, Camellia Creek, and was dismayed to see that my first Amazon review was a one-star. “[B]ut if she did research, she translated it to her own version and trying to rewrite history,” the reviewer says of my Historical Note at the end of Honor’s Banner.  

If the review had been a critique of my writing, I would have simply let the matter drop. I’ve learned there’s no way to defend oneself against a critique on craft without appearing gaseous on sour grapes. This reviewer, however, chose to attack the historical accuracy of my work affording me not only an excellent example supporting the theme of my recent posts on the subject of skewing Southern history but also providing me the opportunity to rebut the reviewer’s negative critique. Hereupon, I risk public censure: 

This challenge was put forth by someone who believes it was, and I quote, “Johnson (Lincoln’s Vice President) who made the south a mess after the war because he was a Southerner and he tried to make it so the Plantation owners could use Blacks to rebuild the south even though they were free, by paying little o[r] nothing for wages and generally keep them slaves even though they were free. Blacks were murdered by the thousands in the south after the war, but she [she being me] doesn’t mention that at all.”  

This reviewer’s understanding of Reconstruction is based on revisionist history promoted over the past fifty years. Johnson, a mule-headed man from east Tennessee hated the plantation elite. His falling out with Congress was actually due to his attempt to carryout Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction (not rebuild the plantation economy, but one of reconciliation), which stumbled in the face of the Radical’s plan of centralization, nullification of state rights, and the demise of Federalism as the Founders meant for it to be. A strong argument can and has been made that Lincoln’s plan cost him his life. I don’t place a lot of stock in Lincoln, but he was not a Radical. Johnson, who the Radicals believed was in their camp, primarily because of his overt enmity to the plantation system, proved a ringer to the Radical cause. He was easier to turn public opinion against than Lincoln would have been, though, so they let him slide (or missed him if one buys into the conspiracy theory of Atzerodt being part of Booth’s team the night Lincoln was murdered and the ancillary belief the Radicals were behind the assassination. I have no opinion either way regarding that particular conspiracy theory.). Nevertheless, the Radicals neutralized Johnson in the fall 1866 elections when the Radicals gained control of Congress.  

As for paying the freed slaves, the Southern economy was in shambles. England, the South’s primary foreign cotton market, had, with the encouragement of Washington and New England mercantilists, cultivated new sources of raw cotton. There was no significant amount of capital to pay anyone until a cotton crop came in—that meant labor with a promise to pay—and the laborers weren’t interested in working and no one made them work. Johnson couldn’t have replicated the plantation economy even if he’d wanted to.  

And those thousands of murdered blacks? I don’t know if a body count was ever made covering twelve years of Reconstruction, and I would be suspect of any number thrown  out there—including the reviewer’s “thousands,” but yes, many were killed: by white Democrats, by white Republicans, and Freedmen killed one another. They killed white folks, too, and white folks killed one another. Some were killed for political reasons, some in self defense. Some murders were real, some were fabricated for fodder in Northern newspapers. At the time of my story, the great majority of Federal troops in the South were Negro and when those troops were disbanded in the spring and summer of 1866 they were trained soldiers. In the years going into Congressional Reconstruction these men (who were all born and raised in the South) made up the bulk of the armed militias supporting the puppet Republican administrations, themselves backed with Federal bayonets. What was happening in the South during these years were pockets of armed warfare. The Negro was not innocent and he was not helpless, no more so than his white counterpart anyway, who, I should add, he outnumbered in Mississippi and South Carolina and made up a significant plurality in the rest of the South. All in all, most of both races survived, actually managing to remain halfway decent to each other despite the aggravation of Northern interlopers.  

But whatever the overall body count, the time period covered by my two novels combined is six months, October 1865-March 1866. Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi ended in December 1865. At that time, things had begun to unravel between Congress and the man they thought was on the Radical side (Johnson), the fall elections of 1866 are a half year away and the Reconstruction Acts, officially issuing-in Congressional Reconstruction are a year down the road. The murders and alleged fraud and intimidation which are today the lore upon which the righteousness of Reconstruction is woven (and which are, I believe, what the reviewer is basing her critique on) are in the future. The white South is trying to find its footing, the Freedmen either remain on the plantations where they lived prior to and during the war for the reason that it was home, it was relatively safe, and they cared for their white folks and their white folks cared for them. Those who left did so because the plantation was either abandoned by its demoralized and defeated owners (assuming they were still alive) or they believed freedom included the freedom to do as they pleased, and that included doing nothing. These indigents numbered in the hundreds of thousands and they found succor in the larger communities secured by Union troops (who, I reiterate, were mostly black), living off the taxpayer—including the Northern one. I know the history, sans slant, which on close inspection of modern works doesn’t add up.  

Likewise, I’m not sure what to make of the reviewer’s take on my characters:  “...she has taken history and twisted it to make it sound like all who supported the north, anti-slavery, President Lincoln (in other words all things Northern) evil and the Southerners were all wonderful people who treat their slaves so wonderful that they continued to serve them after the War.” 

Did she expect me to make my hero a slave-beating, murdering bigot? Hardly sympathetic, and her implication is not true. The hero of Honor’s Banner is a United States Marine, who honored his oath primarily in support of his Blue-grass Kentucky family. The primary antagonists in both stories are Southerners. Yes, my story is prejudiced in favor of the South, but no more so than most works of escape fiction that happen to portray the hero as the “good” guy. Oh duh. I am a Southerner; my ancestors were Southerners. My pro-Southern stance on history is my brand; other than a love of storytelling, it is the reason I write.  

No, what the reviewer finds fault with is that I have dared to challenge the current liberal orthodoxy of Southern treason and intransigence by making heroes of unrepentant Southerners, who refuse to acknowledge the South’s sins against the faux idolatry of Union and democracy both symbolized by that boogeyman, slavery. Or, perhaps it’s simply that I’ve made the South and Southerners—repentant or not—heroic at all. Guess that makes me guilty, too. 

Well, I can handle it.

 

Thanks for reading,

Charlsie

 

 

 

Reading, Writing, and Teaching Southern History

Other Posts in my Southern History Series:
Ilario Pantano’s Grand Theft History


In Grand Theft History, Ilario Pantano addresses the culture war between progressives and conservatives for control of the Republic as well as the Marxists historians who are determined to dismantle the America of our Founders in support of the former. 

I maintain that the Founders’ Republic has been gone for a century and a half, no longer visible or viable with the desecration of Federalism that came with the so-called “ratification” of the 14th and 15th Amendments whereby the central government usurped civil rights and suffrage onto itself, both the sole domain of sovereign states; the 16th amendment which fed and continues to feed the insatiable monster the central government has become today; and the 17th amendment, by which the people of the states sold out state rights in return for pure democracy, thus damaging Federalism every bit as much as did the 14th and 15th amendments.  

In the fall elections of 1866, the people of the victorious North rejected our Founder’s Republic as surely as they’d rejected Southern rights. What was left has been whittled away at ever since. Trying to reconstitute our Founder’s Republic given what happened during the Civil War and Reconstruction is, in my mind, delusional. It’s gone, and I don’t think we’ll see its like again. What made us exceptional was lost, as odd as it may seem to some of you, with the Confederacy. What replaced it was the post-Civil War (and certainly post-founding) narrative on the virtues of civil rights and democracy, and we’ve been traveling that common path of democracies since, and we will meet their common fate, implosion under the social excesses and economic weight of the mob or empire under a dictator. We could hope for “imperial,” great, but not exceptional. Some folks, in fact, believe we are already there. What I haven’t lost is my unwavering conviction that the South was right, and the loss of our Founders’ Republic correlates directly to the unwarranted war waged against her. I do not want the basis for that belief lost, too, particularly to future Southerners. 

In his book, Pantano defines grand theft history as the “improper and intentional omission or distortion of historical fact to the significant detriment of one or more parties.” He begins his argument by establishing that Southerners had something of value that was taken away from them, that being their rightful place in American history by the omission and misstatement of historical facts. He further argues that these omissions and misstatements were/are intentional. Well, I maintain that the South had plenty of value taken from her long before now, but I won’t haggle over the point. This latest slight simply heaps insult on top of injury, but I'm digressing a bit...sorta.

If the reader (jury) agrees with Pantano’s argument, the miscreants are condemned to clean up their act, do their duty, and report the historical record accurately. 

It’s less that I disagree with Pantano on this last point than I believe it is a requirement that cannot and would not be enforced. Who would enforce it? The reader?  

I don’t think so. The powers that be are complicit with liberal historians’ marginalization of Southern history. In the minds of those geared to this agenda, they are doing their duty by twisting the history. Revisionism is as old as history itself.  

No, it’s time for partisan action. We Southerners need to be writing our own history. Of course, a quick perusal of the bibliography Pantano published with Grand Theft shows that we already are and always have been. But that doesn’t change the fact that the academic gatekeepers have left no room in academia for anything but negative reflection of the South. What we Southerners need to do is quit buying into it and start reading (and writing and teaching) our own history books and, for the love of Saint Peter, stop apologizing for something that was normal, accepted, and for which everyone in this nation and most of the world was complicit in, including black folk, and had been millennia before the white man ever set foot on this continent. You take away the bad things we all have done and we wouldn’t have survived as a people on this continent, much less built a nation, not to mention we, as a species, would still be living in caves—and still, no doubt, being bad to one another. Why the devil should the South carry the weight of guilt for all history—oh yeah, that’s right, I get it! Our refusal to reject the full promise of our Founder’s Republic (federalism/decentralization) renders us unrepentant on the issue of slavery—because that was the one and only issue, right? Bullshit. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Classic. Except we’re not suppose to note the baby. It’s the dirty bathwater the left has us focused on. But it’s not about the bathwater. It’s about the baby, and it always has been.

The left believes that the only way to achieve true freedom, as they perceive it to be, is by erasing everything the Republic once stood for and pretending it never was. On top of the ruins it will build its brave new Utopian world where civil rights, equality, and freedom for all is defined and enforced by a “benign” central government (the states relegated to satellites, equally benign, of course).

Ain’t it funny how that Utopian monster, no matter how often it defeats itself with its own stupidity, never ceases to raise its ugly head? Granted its appearance is periodic. I attribute that phenomenon to excess prosperity and esoteric minds, freed from the drudgery of honest labor (thanks to excess prosperity), focused on getting even more of other people’s money to fund/control the Utopian agenda. Ha! If they read more history books, they’d know it never works—oh, darn it, I forgot! That won’t work if they read the revised versions.
 

More—on the virtues of the South, that is—next time and thanks for reading, 

Charlsie

 

 

Ilario Pantano’s Grand Theft History and Skewing the South’s Role

I have a friend, a fellow indie writer, who within the last couple of years has written an award-winning contemporary romance set in Mississippi. The heroine of the story is a history teacher at a local high school who can trace her Southern roots back through a Confederate ancestor, a Revolutionary War hero, and farther still—all the way back to the Mayflower.  

It is such innocuous slights to the South that fueled my resolve a number of years ago to concentrate my reading on Southern history. I don’t mean writings produced over the last fifty years, a proliferation of anti-Southern bias designed, at its most benign, to marginalize the South’s role in this nation to the malicious portrayal of Southerners as violent, murderous opponents to liberty, freedom, and civil rights, supposedly making the South upside down and backwards to what this nation is supposed to stand for. Such portrayal serves a liberal agenda that does, in fact, reject the Founder’s Republic.  

A child of the sixties, during which I witnessed the purposeful destruction of the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, I understand the agenda driving revisionist history. What is inexplicable to me is why so many tax-paying Americans, who more and more find themselves under the thumb of government, fail to make the correlation between the skewing of that history and what is happening to this nation.  

Let’s return to the ancestry of my friend’s Southern heroine that introduced this post. Though not impossible, the ancestral migration cited is improbable. More significantly, when one has the founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, or more convincingly, the great migration to Jamestown in 1609-1610 to draw from, why establish the woman’s historical bona fides via New England? Jamestown predates the Pilgrims by a decade. 

I do not believe the author’s oversight was intentional, rather an honest belief that the Pilgrim’s landing at Plymouth was the iconic moment in colonizing what would become the United States. Maybe it’s the Thanksgiving thing—the turkeys and pumpkin pies and the brief “kumbaya” interlude with the friendly natives. I’ll give the Pilgrims that—I like Thanksgiving, too—but as for being the forefathers of fine Southern lineage, no.  

Imagine my pleasure, then, when on one of my visits to Barnes and Noble, a book bearing the uniformed chest and strong hands of a Revolutionary War soldier cradling his long rifle jumped off the shelf at me: Ilario Pantano’s Grand Theft History. Admittedly, it’s the kind of cover that catches my eye and a quick perusal of the subtitle told me the volume was one after my own heart. Pantano is himself a transplanted Southerner and former U.S. Marine with an understanding of military history, an interest in research, and a talent for writing.  

Grand Theft’s theme deals with the steady disappearance of the South’s role in the history of this nation. He supports his argument by taking a slice of that history, the Revolutionary War, in which the South’s role proved crucial, and shows how that participation has been buried. He presents his argument in the form of a criminal trial in which evidence is presented to a jury to support a case of dereliction on the part of modern historians to give the South its due for the victories in the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781, which led to Cornwallis’ retreat to and subsequent surrender at Yorktown. In school, I learned about Lexington and Concord, the Declaration, Trenton, Saratoga, and Benedict Arnold, and, of course, I knew Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown bringing it all to an end. I knew there was fighting in the South, but nothing I learned emphasized the strategic importance of the Southern theatre. As I grew into an adult, I learned that the war was particularly vicious in the South, while ancillary reading about events to the north left me with the feeling that there was too much pragmatic intercourse going on between the antagonists. Today, I wonder if the British wouldn’t have been better off if they’d dealt with their Southern colonists with equally kid gloves. But then, perhaps, their Southern colonists simply wouldn’t have it. 

Have you ever asked yourself how Cornwallis managed to get himself surrounded in Yorktown, Virginia or what he was doing there to begin with? Personally, I can’t recall ever studying that in school, but I’m no spring chicken and “school” was a long time ago. To make a long story short, for those who don’t know, he was there because he’d hauled his ass out of the Carolinas before he’d lost his entire army. The British had, since his victorious landing at Charleston in the late spring of 1780, met with several resounding defeats at the hands of some very pissed off frontiersman—those being, to hit some of the  highpoints, Huck’s Crossing, King’s Mountain, Cowpens, but there were more—all crowned by Cornwallis’ Pyrrhic victory at Guilford Courthouse. Not only was Guilford costly, the Patriots got away to boot. That’s when Cornwallis decided it was time to get out of the Carolinas. Things were a little more stable in Virginia, so that’s where he headed. He holed up in Yorktown on the coast and waited for General Clinton, cozy in New York, to come move him to safety. Clinton promised to come, but dawdled, and the Americans and French beat him to Cornwallis. Pacification of the South had failed and renewed hope swelled the Patriot ranks stalemated to the north. In a blink it was over (at least according to the history books) and the final decisive victories had been won by hard fighting Southerners who were fed up being violated by British regulars, irregulars, and colonial loyalists recruited not only amongst their neighbors in the South, but in New England.  

But you know something I learned specifically from Pantano’s book? On February 27, 1776, Carolina patriots defeated a much larger force of Carolina loyalists at a place called Moores Creek Bridge in North Carolina. The loyalists were on their way to augment British naval forces for the planned assault on Charleston in June of that same year. Turns out they really needed those ground forces, because a few months later the British naval bombardment of Sullivan’s Island, defending Charleston Harbor, failed. The British ships took a licking and sailed away, delaying the main offensive against the Southern colonies four years. That failure to bring the Southern colonies to heel would ultimately cost Britain the war. 

In 1781 Mother England knew where the final gambit had been played...and lost. As cited above, she’d already prudently postponed a second invasion of an area (South Carolina) where she’d already been thwarted once. In addition to unfriendly colonists, there was the environment which was hostile to conventional armies. Okay, it was hostile to just about everybody, but the patriots there had struggled long and hard to build what they had. They had adjusted to not only the environment but the native inhabitants born and bred in that briar patch; they had, themselves, become indigenous. Now, with the north at a stalemate and the promise of Southern loyalists (also indigenous, which is what made the war there so nasty) who would rally to the British cause, she decided the time was ripe to subdue what remained of the rebels. At the time, a great deal was made by Mother England’s intent to invade the South. Immediately after, a great deal was made of her decision to have done so and who was to blame for the failure. Today that has fallen out of the mainstream histories. Oh, books are written by Southerners, but the television documentaries and the academic histories, and the curriculum taught in the prestigious, left-leaning universities, which for some reason I am unable to fathom, have been dubbed the torch-bearers of American history, gloss over the Southern role. These people have the market, leaving no room for the Southern presentation, something Pantano points out along with a detailed list and description of the miscreants. It’s not that the South’s role was more important, but certainly it was as important and the strategic picture for ultimate victory needs to be studied overall, from start to finish. There is plenty of room for the recognition of all. Two-hundred and thirty-six plus years ago we all worked together..., but we were a different nation then. 

I am a Southerner. This theme of promoting the South’s role in this nation is dear to me. I’ll never be an academic and I’m never going to make a movie or a television documentary, but I do intend to fight back against the forces undermining not only the South, but our Founders as well.

 

More next time and thanks for reading. 

Charlsie