Born Fighting (25 page)

They were wrong, of course. The end result of this war was not to conquer a culture, although the South as a region would suffer enormously for another seventy years. Instead, the war’s horrendous aftermath drove so many people of Scots-Irish descent outward, to the north and west, that their core values became the very spirit of a large portion of working-class America.

PART SIX

Reconstruction. Diaspora.
Reeducation?
                              

Daddy was a veteran, a Southern Democrat,
They ought to get a rich man to vote like that.
*
Somebody told us Wall Street fell,
But we were so poor that we couldn’t tell.
Cotton was short and the weeds were tall,
But Mr. Roosevelt was gonna save us all.
Gone, gone with the wind,
There ain’t nobody looking back again.

—
ALABAMA,
“Song of the South”

                              

1

The Mess the Yankees Made
                              

LITERATURE, DESPITE ITS
emotional honesty, often thrives in the realm of imagination, histrionics, and deliberate exaggeration. But there are few lies that one could write about the South that would be any more interesting or compelling than its own odd and haunting truths. More than any other region in America, the South’s ethnic base has remained surprisingly constant. Although a continuous outflow of dispossessed Southerners has percolated through the other regions of America, particularly the Midwest, the North-Central factory belt, the Rocky Mountains, and along the Pacific Coast, until very recently only a small trickle of new blood has found its way back in. Thus its history still rings true to its inhabitants as a thing literally alive, not as an academic subject to be studied in order to understand the growth of a nation, but as a vivid reminder of the journey of one’s ancestors. As I wrote of the Appalachian Mountain region in my novel
Fields of Fire
, “Jackson’s people fought those rocks. Here they struggled still. Those sole places where a man could still walk where great-great-great-grandfather walked, still sleep where he died. Not because they were the first and seized it. Because they were the last and no one wanted it.”
¹
Or, as Nobel laureate novelist William Faulkner so famously put it, “In the South the past is not dead; it isn’t even past.”

For more than two hundred years before the Civil War, the South was a variegated, ever-growing laboratory of truly odd social experimentation, a land of vast economic extremes, of romanticism unfazed by primitive reality, a place of clashing cultures whose barons somehow justified the outright ownership of hundreds of human beings as Athenian in its dignity as well as biblically proper. During that war, the region paid its dues to history, losing or scarring virtually a full generation of its young manhood, seeing its towns and cities besieged and leveled, and being forced through military occupation to rejoin a political compact that its leaders had rejected. And for nearly a hundred years after war and occupation, the South along with former slave states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, and even parts of Missouri that had not officially joined the rebellion were denigrated, attacked repeatedly through the instruments of the federal government, and economically colonized while at the same time their leaders defiantly resisted all pressures from the outside.

A form of self-protection eventually arrived through the Solid South’s power in the Congress, gained by the sort of bloc voting now used by ethnic groups such as blacks and Jews, except that in this case the voting was both regional and ethnic, with the deliberate exclusion of blacks after the turmoil of Reconstruction. Sadly, this solidarity against external manipulation came with quite an internal bill. For decades, fresh or even divergent opinions were stifled from above, sometimes violently, through the vehicle of a near-mandatory loyalty to the Democratic Party’s powerful monopoly. This control of the Southern political process extended from the local sheriff all the way to the Congress and the Senate, and resulted in the eventual diminishment not only of blacks but also of many whites.

Contrary to the usual talk among the nation’s intellectual elites about a troublesome “white trash” fringe that circled a larger middle class, in the South of the late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth centuries, a significant percentage of whites—one is tempted to say a plurality—were living in economic conditions no different than most blacks. And, contrary to a great deal of current mythology, much of it fed by Hollywood, the diminishment of blacks has always been less a “redneck” phenomenon than a device for maintaining social and economic control ordered from above at the threat of losing one’s place—or job—in the white community. The three-tiered power structure that had begun in Virginia from its earliest colonial days seemed actually to gain new momentum in the war-scarred postbellum South. Even on the eve of World War II, eight states of the old Confederacy still used a poll tax, preventing poorer citizens, white and black, from voting, although in many places blacks were further excluded by a series of cleverly administered “literacy tests” specifically designed to prevent their participation.

But before this admitted overreaction by the region’s white leadership came the unreasoned and ill-advised onslaught from the North that lit the fires of a permanent and vitriolic resentment.

The legacy of the years immediately following the Civil War is so divisive that it comprises a vast Rorschach test for anyone attempting to neatly assign blame or responsibility for the racial and sectional animosities that followed. The amorphous inkblot that all are asked to interpret is the plight of millions of former slaves who, in abrupt fashion, needed assistance in their voyage toward full freedom. In a nutshell, the victorious Northerners who came south with the military and Reconstruction government viewed the moral justification for the war purely in terms of empowering those who had been enslaved. This goal absorbed their postwar energies above all others, often at the deliberate expense of the “rebels” who had attempted to secede and who in their view had brought such blood and chaos to the country. Not surprisingly their intended and frequent targets, the Southern whites, saw instead a military occupation and the deliberate vilification of their leaders, and also the cynical manipulation of illiterate and pliable former slaves as a weapon to politically destabilize the region.

In the middle, as they would be for more than a hundred years, were the blacks themselves. And by virtue of a whole passel of Northern policies that on the one hand were filled with retribution and on the other ended in halfhearted resignation, they were doomed. As Wilbur Cash put it, “Had there been no Reconstruction the result would have been unhappy. . . . But mark how the Yankee was heaping up the odds. In his manipulation of the unfortunate black man he was of course generating a terrible new hatred for him. Worse, he was inevitably extending this hate to the quarter where there had been no hate before: to the master class.”
²

And the yeomen would stand by their Captains. Again, Cash: “Reconstruction was, for our purposes, simply an extension of [the] War. . . . During those thirty years the South was like nothing so much as a veteran army.” But the South itself had come together and was in its emotions a different place than during those years before the war. “If in that long-ago, already half-fabulous time before rebellion roared at Sumter, this South they had cheered had still perhaps seemed to them a little nebulous, it was not so any longer. . . . Four years of fighting for the preservation of their world and their heritage, four years of measuring themselves against the Yankee in the intimate and searching contact of battle, had left these Southerners far more self-conscious than they had been before, far more aware of their differences and of the line which divided what was Southern from what was not.”
³

To the amazement—and the continual consternation—of the outside forces that came south to reap the benefits of conquest and to “reconstruct” the basis of its society, during more than a decade of military occupation and radical political policies, very few whites in the region broke ranks. The warrior aristocracy whose roots were in the long-ago lowlands of Scotland was still in place in the South of the late 1800s. Indeed, the trampled South would surprise the nation with the number of soldiers it provided to the otherwise hated Yankee Blue when war broke out against Spain in 1898. The Scots-Irish culture was resilient, while for better or for worse its core values remained constant. It had hardened and adapted to the changes brought about by long journeys to Ireland, to the Appalachian Mountains, and to all the westward destinations where the informal family ties had melded into an interlocking network in what appeared to be a chaotic wilderness, until its mores had become the very backbone of the South. The Civil War had only strengthened these links of “Celtic kinship,” galvanizing them with remembered acts of courage and horrendous loss. If in 1861 a soldier had marched off to battle remembering the sacrifices of Londonderry, Valley Forge, King’s Mountain, New Orleans, and the Indian wars, by 1865 he and his extended family—a kinship that stretched throughout the region—knew that no army in modern history had fought harder and at such cost as his own. And in their view, during Reconstruction every piece of the fabric of their existence was still under attack.

The North, under the umbrella of the Republican Party, did indeed come south to free the slaves and improve their lot. But many of its soldiers, government hacks, and businessmen also came for more sinister reasons; to celebrate their conquest, to exact revenge for the war, and to sink their capital assets deeply and permanently inside a devastated economy. David Hackett Fischer mentions that the Civil War “radically transformed northern attitudes toward southern folkways. As casualty lists grew longer northern aims changed from an intention merely to resist the expansion of southern culture to a determination to transform it. As this attitude spread through the northern states the Civil War became a cultural revolution. . . . Radical Reconstruction was an attempt to impose by force the cultures of New England and the midlands upon the coastal and highland south.”
⁴

And thus the goals of Reconstruction, involving far more than bringing new peace to a nation whose heart had been torn in two by war, became a matter of perspective. To the typical Scots-Irish Southerner, this attempt to impose the culture of New England was little different than the perpetual English invasions of Scotland or the Anglican attempts at political hegemony in Ulster. The Northern dominance of all manner of economic systems brought by Reconstruction laws and policies could not be stopped by the South’s defeated leaders, and in many cases was not even understood by the average Southern yeoman. But assaults on personal dignity and an attempt to change their way of life were, as always in this culture, a different thing.

For the most well-intentioned advocates of eliminating slavery, Reconstruction involved grand ideals, and the cold reality that in the short term, true equality for former slaves could only be accomplished by the heavy hand of outside force. The clearest and most honest voice on their behalf came from former slave and noted abolitionist Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most famous African-American of the nineteenth century. In 1866, Douglass was calling for a Reconstructive effort “to bring under Federal authority States into which no loyal man from the North may safely enter, and to bring men into the national councils who . . . do not even conceal their deadly hate of the country that conquered them . . . Slavery . . . today is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South. . . . The people . . . want a reconstruction such as will protect loyal men, black and white, in their persons and property. . . . The plain, common-sense way of doing this work is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike.”
⁵

But even Abraham Lincoln himself had favored a gradual emancipation, with financial compensation given to former slave owners,
⁶
while the Reconstruction government attempted to accomplish the new world they envisioned through immediate assimilation and outright confiscation. The result was a predictably fierce resistance, followed by failure and, ultimately, retribution. By the end of Reconstruction, Douglass was writing, “You say you have emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation? . . . When you turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.”
⁷

The backlash became inevitable because the pressure from the North was openly hateful, infuriating the whites, and yet at the same time temporary, abandoning the blacks as the Northern occupiers went home without ever having broken the will of those they had conquered. During their stay, the occupation and Reconstruction governments did exact a heavy price in the face of this resistance. These governments were more than military; they had attempted to take over every point of control inside Southern society, from the courts to the educational system to the economy itself. Again, Cash: “For ten years the courts of the South were in such hands that no loyal white man could hope to find justice in them as against any Negro or any white-creature of the Yankee policy. . . . The level of education fell tragically in these decades. Actual illiteracy increased among the millions. But what was worse was that the state universities ceased in effect to exist for loyal whites in the Thorough period and went for long years thereafter with empty halls and skeleton facilities. . . . If the leadership of the Old South in its palmiest days had too often been only half-educated, even by American standards, the leadership of the land in 1890 would be scarcely better instructed and scarcely less simple in outlook than that of the first generation to emerge from the frontier.”
⁸

And worse. Rights of citizenship were denied many former Confederates, including a provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which in one passage famously directed that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” while in its very next section it denied many former Confederates the right to vote or hold public office. Since they were labeled rebels and “insurrectionists,” Confederate veterans were not allowed federal benefits for their wartime service, reinforcing the concept of states’ rights as local governments did their best to assist the legions of men who had become disabled during the war. Tales are rife from this period of the Northern occupiers actively encouraging public ridicule of and personal attacks upon former Confederate soldiers by freed slaves. Predictably, such actions were met with brutal retaliatory attacks in the dead of night designed to intimidate both the hated Yankees and the African-American instruments of their revenge.