Inventing Yesterday, The Contested Memory of the Old South

“ There is nothing left of that civilization now but a few remnants of its gray columns—themselves grown gray as if in honor of the uniforms they wore—and the thrilling and pathetic story of its vanished prestige and power lingering among its tombstones and monuments like the fragrance of roses that are faded and gone. Never again will the white-columned mansions of the masters glorify the groves of live oak and the orange and the palm where Southern beauty was wooed and won by Southern chivalry, and life was an endless chain of pleasure. ”

“ I think one will search in vain history, ancient or modern, to find a likeness to the Old South, socially, intellectually, politically, or religiously. I do not wonder that romancer, poet, historian, and philosopher have gathered from it material and inspiration. As a matter of fact, the past decade has brought forth more literature concerning the Old South than the entire generation which preceded it. Its body lies moldering in the ground, but its soul goes marching on. ”

“ In the generation that has grown up since the '60's, there is a disposition to undervalue the merits of the "Old South" and to discount the patriotism and the courage, the sacrifice and the suffering of those, who wore the grey. If these pages shall recall to my old comrades with any degree of pleasure, the lights and shadows of our soldier life, or shall bring to the younger generation, to whom the Old South is not even a memory, a truer conception of "the tender grace of a day that is dead" I shall be more than repaid for the labor involved in their preparation. ”

“ You can only know the New South, but there is a generation, now passing away, which holds in loving memory the South as it used to be. 10 Those memories are a legacy to the new generation from the old, and it behooves the old to hand them down to the new.
"The days that are no more" come crowding around me, insistent that I interpret them as I knew them; there are the happy plantation days, the recollection of which causes my heart to throb again with youthful pleasure, and near them are the days, the dreadful days, of war and fire and famine. ”

“ There was at the end of the war and is now a strong and steadfast affection between the old slaves of the South and their former masters. If that feeling of confidence had been allowed to continue without the evil influence of the carpet-bagger all would have been well. The Southern white man is the only man on earth who understands the negro character, and he is the only man who is now fitted to solve the intricate race relations of the future. ”

“ It floated past through the archway, toward those eyes. Who was it laughed in there? The old South itself—that incredible, fine, lost soul! That "old-time" thing of old ideals, blindfolded by its own history! That queer, proud blend of simple chivalry and tyranny, of piety and the abhorrent thing! Who was it laughed out of that old slave-market, at these white eyeballs glaring from out of the blackness of this dark cattle-pen? What poor departed soul in this House of Melancholy? But there was no ghost when we turned to look—only our old guide with her sweet smile. ”

“ It tears down the marriage altar, and tramples its sacred ashes under its feet. It creates and nourishes polygamy. It feeds and pampers its hateful handmaid, prejudice.
It has divided our national councils. It has engendered deadly strife between brethren. It has wasted the treasure of the Commonwealth, and the lives of thousands of brave men, and driven troops of helpless women and children into yawning tombs. It has caused the bloodiest civil war recorded in the book of time. It has shorn this nation of its locks of strength that was rising as a young lion in the Western world. ”

“ From individual instances like this, one may form a clearer notion of the internal slave-trade of America. Thousands every year are thus brought down the Mississippi to supply the Natchez and New Orleans markets. "Those who are transported down the Mississippi," says a manual of American slavery, "are stowed away on the decks of steam-boats, males and females, old and young, usually chained, subject to the jeers and taunts of the passengers and navigators, and often by bribes or threats, or by the lash, made subject to abominations not to be named." ”

“ Along the banks of the Mississippi, for miles beyond the city, stretch the fertile plantations of the representatives of aristocratic French families. The rich lands are worked by negro slaves, who, fresh from the African coast, walk erect before their masters, being strangers to the abject, crouching gait which a century of slavery afterwards imposes upon them. ”

“ No antiquity hallows, no public services consecrate, no gifts of lofty culture adorn, no graces of noble breeding embellish the coarse and sordid oligarchy that gives law to us. And in the blighting shadow of Slavery letters die and art cannot live. What book has the South ever given to the libraries of the world? What work of art has she ever added to its galleries? What artist has she produced that did not instinctively fly, like Allston, to regions in which genius could breathe and art was possible? ”

“ As Colonel Thomas, assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau in Mississippi, in a letter addressed to me, very pungently expresses it: "The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and, however much they may admit that the relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves, they treat the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate." ”

“ Remote from cities, the dweller still in the old plantation hut, neighboring to the sulky, disaffected master class, who still think her freedom was a personal robbery of themselves, none of the "fair humanities" have visited her humble home. The light of knowledge has not fallen upon her eyes. The fine domesticities which give the charm to family life, and which, by the refinement and delicacy of womanhood, preserve the civilization of nations, have not come to her. She has still the rude, coarse labor of men. With her rude husband she still shares the hard service of a field-hand. ”

“ Under this condition of things to-day, while he if properly protected in his rights would hold political supremacy in Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and 166 Florida, he has little or no voice in either State or National Government.
Through fear, intimidation, assassination, and all the horrors that barbarism can invent, every right of the negro in the Southern States is to-day at an end. Complete submission to the whites is the only way for the colored man to live in peace. ”

“ The Negro exodus is the most serious economic matter that confronts the people of Mississippi today. And it isn't worth while to sit around and cuss the labor agents either. That won't help us the least bit in getting to a proper solution. We may as well face the facts, even when the facts are very ugly and very much against us. The plain truth of the matter is the white people of Mississippi are not giving the Negro a square deal. And this applies not merely to Mississippi, but to all the other states in the South. ”

“ The reconstructed legislatures pensioned Confederate soldiers and their families. “Notorious and unpardoned rebels” were elected as state officers and to Congress.
Worse than this, nearly all the southern States passed laws which went far toward reducing the blacks again to slavery. In Virginia, if a negro broke his labor-contract, the employer could pursue him and compel him to work an extra month, with chain and ball if necessary. In Mississippi negro children who were orphans, or whose parents did not support them, were to be apprenticed till they became of age. ”

“ The uprising of the people of Mississippi against Negro rule was a most magnificent example of that spirit of Southern patriotism that animated the hearts; first of such men as Walthall, Lamar, George, Featherston, Stone, Lowry and Harris, and then spread to the hearts of every true man in Mississippi. The young men of the State, the rising generation, have the greatest reverence and love for the brave men who fought such a gallant fight for the preservation of white supremacy in Mississippi. ”

“ The experiment of negro suffrage was a most stupendous blunder. Under that vicious system society was depressed to a greater degree than could be borne. For ten long years was Mississippi ruled by the adventurer, who filled the mind of the negroes with a spirit of misrule, prejudice and hatred against their former masters. He found a people impoverished by the loss of millions in slave property, and made penniless by a long and protracted war. ”

“ It was a struggle in which the forces of honesty and intelligence were arrayed against those of dishonesty and ignorance.
There could only be one result in the battle for the mastery between the white man and the negro; the negro must give way. The fight was fought and won. The South was redeemed. The Southern people exercised the right of revolution to free themselves. They used force, the only means in their power to overthrow misrule, corruption and dishonesty. ”

“ If the negro is made to earn his full citizenship by his own efforts it will teach him to take pride in it.
Under the Mississippi system the disfranchisement of a few whites was unavoidable, but it was thought that they should pay the penalty of ignorance rather than endanger the safety of the State. The whites who were disfranchised accepted the situation without a murmur. ”

“ When impartial history shall be written by the truthful and the just, the names of these men who knelt at the shrine of the Old South and laid their hopes, their fortunes and their lives on its sacred altar, shall shine with the names of the world’s greatest heroes, and generations yet to be shall scatter flowers above their hallowed dust, as sweet tokens of their undying love and their devotion to the precious memories that cling about the folded Stars and Bars. ”

“ We, the survivors and descendants, have buckled on the armor of faithfulness and are honoring the memory of our martyred heroes. We are rearing monuments to perpetuate their deeds of valor. We are cleaning their revered names from aspersion. We are striving to educate the generations to come in the true history of their marvelous struggle for the inalienable rights of every free-born American. ”

“ But, at the same time, these controversies are kept alive, and, for the defeated, are stirred up incessantly by anniversaries and celebrations, natural but, if it be the object of Americans, as many of them assure us it is, to let the memory of the past die out like that of a horrid dream, impolitic. The spirit which animated the Southern States is neither dead nor sleeping. ”

“ None has been more successful in blending the witchery of romance with the patriotic, but often stern and cruel realities of revolutionary warfare. We have had many romances founded upon the events of the struggle which terminated in the independence of the United States, too many of which, we are sorry to say, have been characterized by inflation of style and exaggerated portraitures—by improbable and often impossible incidents, and a total departure from the historic record. ”

“ History to be of any value must be true. It must disclose not only the truth but the whole truth. In vain would the historian seek this in the frail monuments vaguely preserved in the uncertain legend of tradition. He must resort to national records and to the testimony of writers contemporary with the events which he attempts to describe, and if the latter abstain from the narration of ‘disgusting sketches of human depravity and barbarism,’ history must be curtailed of her most fruitful source of incident, and men and nations stripped of their boldest peculiarity. ”

“ History, when divested of the graces of eloquence, and of that veil which the imagination is taught to throw over antiquity, presents a disgusting, terrible list of crimes and calamities: murders, assassinations, battles, revolutions, are the memorable events of history. The love of glory atones for military barbarity; treachery and fraud are frequently dignified with the names of prudence and policy; and the historian, desirous to appear moral and sentimental, yet compelled to produce facts, makes out an inconsistent, ambiguous system of morality. ”

“ But now, where the spirit of the Western civilisation prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood, to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means,—by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. ”

“ Time has softened much; even the Civil War begins to stand forth in some firmness of outline and clarity of atmosphere. But when we come to reconstruction—grave historians grow almost hysterical, romancers pass the bounds of possibilities, and even official figures contradict one another with sublime effrontery. ”

“ As it's been said many times, we must learn from the mistakes of history, or we're doomed to repeat them. We must all realize what we're capable of, when we close our hearts, and allow our minds to justify such brutal and inhuman acts. ”

“ Gray either willfully misrepresented the original act, or attempted to state its substance from memory; and if the latter be true, then, as his memory was bad and his prejudices great, he misrepresented the measure, and made it much worse than it really was. There can be no excuse for the misrepresentation of an act by a grave historian, especially one that he condemns in the harshest language, when he has easy access to the act itself. ”

“ His memory is like one of those historical paintings, where Virgil and Dante sit side by side conversing. These perspectives and foreshortenings are a great barrier between peoples. It is ever so difficult for a person of one tradition to remember what is contemporary in the tradition of another.
Almost nothing that goes by the name of Historic Rights or Historic Wrongs can be called a truly objective view of the past. Take, for example, the Franco-German debate about Alsace-Lorraine. ”