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THE CIVIL WAR: Author questions the outcome of Northern 'victory'

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, January 8, 2006

By TOM DODGE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

By piecing together the written and oral artifacts of the past into an analytical narrative, historians tell us where we are, how we got here and where we're going. Christopher Waldrep, Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University, focuses on Vicksburg, Miss., where 19,000 Civil War soldiers died in 1863, to show how its monuments and literature represent an ironic legacy of the war. His point is that Vicksburg's 19th-century mythmakers installed in the national consciousness the prevailing memory that the war wasn't about emancipation at all but rather about the defense of nobility, honor and chivalry.

The artifacts uncovered for Vicksburg's Long Shadow: The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance include 633 endnotes. There are references from the Civil War generals' memoirs, of course, but many more taken from the journals, letters and diaries of ordinary soldiers and civilians of Vicksburg during the war and Reconstruction era. The story they tell is startling: The North did not actually win the Civil War when General Lee surrendered.

"I wanted to know what northern soldiers thought they fought for and how their thinking changed through the war," Dr. Waldrep writes in his introduction. He found that they came to realize the error of their belief that they were fighting for the Constitution and rule of law.

"Their vision of law and constitutionalism did not prevail," he writes, "lynching did. In the long run, I knew, the white South had 'won' the Civil War – if that war is understood to pit freedom against racial oppression. Slavery did not return after 1865, but peonage, segregation, and mob violence subjected 'freed' people to a different kind of bondage."

The North, not the South, is ultimately responsible for this result, he believes, for it reconstructed the South in a way that encouraged belief in its sentimental myth of the "Lost Cause." By concentrating on strategy, the "game" of war, the generals contributed to this myth in their memoirs, and even President Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, made no reference to slavery as a reason for the war. The enshrinement of the war's battlefields, cemeteries and monuments contributes to this myth. Every attempt by the U.S. Department of Justice to institute equality under the law was thwarted, the author writes, by white Southern sheriffs and other state officials.

Civil rights and voting laws were weakened by the U.S. Supreme Court. "Conservative whites complained about the laws," he goes on, and about taxes to enforce them when, as one white landowner wrote, "slavery ... cost no tax money."

Soon the old antebellum regime was restored, run by "white elites," and Vicksburg's legislature quickly installed punitive laws designed to return black people to a "slavelike status." By the end of the 19th century, the author goes on, Southern whites were again in complete control.

Dr. Waldrep's conclusions are arguable, but what is clear from his findings is the warning to any culture setting out to right another culture's wrongs: Understand the culture and its myths. It is one thing to prevail over it militarily. It is quite another to change its beliefs.

Writer and NPR commentator Tom Dodge lives in Midlothian.

The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance

Christopher Waldrep (Rowman & Littlefield, $26.95)

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