Confederate History Month

Recently the state of Virginia re-instituted its recognition of Confederate History Month. This makes it the seventh state to celebrate Confederate history (Virginia previously did so from 1994 to 2002). A source of outrage for many was the Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's failure to even mention slavery in his proclamation. When I told my American friends in Turkey about this, we shared a collective shock. Indeed, while writing about this I have struggled to use a big picture detachment instead of narrow thinking.

I actually don’t oppose a month for learning more about the Confederacy. History is important and under-studied. People should understand the past and current fissures in society. People should understand their heritage and be able to contextualize the Civil War as a conflict between an outdated, immoral economic system and modern industrialization. The Civil War is the bloodiest in our history, and it’s the last time that American civilians were subjected to war—we’ve been “lucky” to keep fighting on other people’s land. The failure of the Confederacy and its human cost is our best lesson in “war is Hell,” which we seem to have replaced with “war is necessary and sometimes optimal.”

However, I suspect that the common display of Confederate flags in the South and the celebration of Confederate History Month is not rooted in these interpretations of why the Confederacy should be studied. While admittedly generalizing, the South—still economically and socially backward—perceives the Civil War, or the War for Southern Independence, as a noble struggle of liberty against coercion. The obvious irony is that Confederate liberty meant the freedom to deprive blacks of theirs.

This is why Governor McDonnell’s initial omission of slavery from his proclamation to celebrate Confederate History is so disconcerting. It either intentionally or obliviously divorces the Confederacy from the ideology and economic system it defended. To be fair, Governor McDonnell’s announcement did not normatively praise the Confederacy. An optimist might say that Governor McDonnell’s proclamation was cool and intellectual, simply saying that this period should be studied in the context of its time and for its continuing significance today. The revised proclamation now available on his website seems to strike an acceptable tone of what the Civil War and the Confederacy represent.

But I’m always afraid that America is becoming a safe haven for backward ideas—xenophobia toward immigrants, hatred towards homosexuals, Biblical literalism, self-regulating markets, private hand-gun ownership, etc. A reading of the Civil War that emphasizes the Confederacy’s fight for freedom would probably do less harm than these other examples, but I’d like us to be subtracting from the list, not adding to it.