I recently read
Hodding Carter’s The Angry Scar, an
easy-to-read overview of Reconstruction written by a moderate Southerner with a
knowledge of history and obviously possessed with an interest in the “whys” of
what happened—particularly after Reconstruction—and into the twentieth century.
I’ve had the book for several years, but about to delve into the sequel to my
most recent novel, Camellia Creek, I
finally took time to sit down and read it. One book in THE MAINSTREAM OF AMERICA
SERIES published back in
the 1950s, the entire set sweeps American history from the discovery of the New
World up to, well, the 1950s. I intend to ferret out other books in the series
to see if they are as good as this one. Then again, perhaps it is simply Hodding
Carter’s writing I like.
An editor of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times
(Greenville, Mississippi), Carter wrote a slew of books. This particular work
comes replete with an extensive bibliography for further reading. Yes, I like
older works, written before the revisionist has polluted the record by the
mores and values of his present day (and yes, I know that same revisionist
would argue the older works are polluted by the heat and passions of times too
close to events). But it is the heat and passions and truths, such as the
people living during those times perceived them to be, that I’m trying to
capture in my insignificant works of escape fiction.
Hodding Carter
ends the forward of The Angry Scar thus:
“...; and my overriding purposes have been to separate truth from myth and to
link significant past events with the present legacies of those events. In
attempting to do these things I have become convinced that it has been almost
as unfortunate for our nation that the North has remembered so little of
Reconstruction as that the South has remembered so much.”
Today, so much of
the myth is irrelevant to where the
focus of the argument should lie, and spouting it undermines the rightness of
the South’s cause. It simply is not needed; substantiated truth more than
fulfills that goal. For all the right reasons the South was right, and in my opinion the “present
legacies” prove it.
During my
pre-teen years, through high-school, college, and even into my early days in
the Navy, I was a football fan. One might even say that football was the man in
my life. (Bear with me here. I do have a point.) In late summer, I could
“smell” football in the air and see it in the changing blue of the sky. Yeah,
it was really the approach of fall, but to me it was football. The demands of
the Navy interrupted my weekend-long sojourns in front of the television. Then
I got married and had a real man in my life, followed by his children. My
interest in football, if not the unrequited love, faded away. Occasionally,
when talking with my oldest son, I’ll slip and place the Colts in Baltimore.
Hell, Johnny U is still the quarterback.
Now, to my point:
In the last
chapter of The Angry Scar, Carter
highlights all the old “myths” I grew up with regarding the South’s fight for
independence and the degradation and humiliation of Reconstruction and the
justification for all that came after. It’s easy to read between the lines and
suspect he’s putting forth those old arguments tongue-in-cheek, as if maybe he
doesn’t quite believe them himself, or more likely that he does and they simply
don’t matter anymore (the book was published in 1959 at the dawn of the Civil
Rights Movement, and he was a Kennedy man). When I read those arguments, as
real to me today as when I learned them growing up, I ask myself, “Are you in
as big a time warp on this subject as you are in regards to the Baltimore
Colts?”
Maybe, but I really do
know that the Colts are in Indianapolis and Johnny Unitas is a football legend
passed on to Glory. I’ve been out of the Navy and back home now for as long as
I was in. I don’t live in a vacuum. I’m very much aware of the party that
controls the White House and who or what controls the Congress of the United
States; of universal suffrage and an electorate that votes into office corrupt
men and women who pilfer the earnings of working Americans to feed their
dissolute government handout programs and perpetuate the cycle of non-working
recipients voting them back into office; of costs driven so high by the perverse
injection of tax-payers’ dollars and federal regulations into private programs
such as healthcare and higher education that even younger, working tax-payers
are forced to accept government support in order to make ends meet.
I heard it said not
long ago that public memory was around five years. So, theoretically, in five
years people will struggle under the onerous weight of Obamacare as if it’s
always been part of us, just like the huge socialist programs and federal
interference enacted by LBJ fifty some odd years ago have “always” been part of
us as has the misinterpreted “retirement plan” known as Social Security inacted under
FDR and the income tax under Woodrow
Wilson. Those programs are all twentieth- and, now, twenty-first-century Constitutional
violations attributed to democrats, but the republicans have done nothing to
eliminate them. This huge expansion of Federal control links directly to the
South’s defeat a century and a half ago. That concept is regarded as a joke
these days, yet things just keep getting worser
and worser.
This brings me
back to Hodding Carter’s forward—the North’s remembering so little, the South’s
so much. It’s good to remember for the sake not only of the South but even more so
for the Republic. As critical as the delegation of powers between the three
branches of the Federal government, so too was the delineation of powers
between the federal government, clearly limited by the Constitution, and that
of the States—broadly interpreted by the Tenth Amendment and insisted upon by
the states upon ratification of the Constitution. No, I do not
believe the War was over slavery. I do believe people use such lofty arguments to
excuse the things they do, but I do not believe populations kill and sacrifice their lives for
philanthropic purposes. Economic self-interest, offensive or defensive, couched as such, yes. I do believe the South seceded
to protect its economic interests in the face of a hate-filled section of the
nation that enacted repeated threats to Dixie’s interests (not to mention
darker, more nefarious threats to her people) for the betterment of its own.
And yes, I do believe the South had a right to secede to protect its interests, its way of life, and its people. No, I do not believe
the South started the War, despite the provocation at Sumter—Lincoln, not
Jefferson Davis, chose war. And yes, I do accept Lincoln prosecuted the War
better than did Davis (oh duh).
And finally, yes, I do
have lofty dreams, which any of you who know the history of then and of the time
since can understand, if not necessarily appreciate. Those are no less than the
nullification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the striking of paragraph 2 from the
Fifteenth, and repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment.
That should put the correct powers back into the states where they belong, end
that “anchor baby” bullshit, and cut off the exorbitant capital the Federals
require to fund their give-away programs and the corresponding bureaucracy to
operate them, while at the same time holding the States hostage for taxpayers’
dollars. Of course, to be on the safe side, the sixteenth amendment should
probably be replaced with something else clarifying that income tax is not
apportioned—it wasn’t in 1789 and it isn’t today—to keep Congress from
continuing to pilfer the working man’s dollars by perverting Article 1, Section
8 of the Constitution. And just another little point regarding the sixteenth
amendment—the controversies regarding the
actions of way too many state legislatures reported to have ratified that thing
makes it, in my humble opinion, worthy of nullification vice repeal—can states nullify what they passed in
violation of their own constitutions? I don't know the answer.
Good luck
with all that, right? Tongue-in-cheek aside, I wonder what Hodding Carter would think
of the looming power of the Federal government, fueled by a corrupt democracy,
today?
Yep, those “present legacies” just keep getting worser and worser.
