As a native South Carolinian, I have not been looking forward to the sesquicentennial of the dumbest, most self-destructive move in the long and checkered history of my home state.
I refer, of course, to the Palmetto State’s boneheaded decision to attempt secession from the United States of America on December 20, 1860. The knuckleheads behind this doomed move were wrong about everything: that slavery could or should survive, that slavery is compatible with Christianity, that states had a legal right to secede, that the North wouldn’t fight or that if it did the brave southrons would quickly whip those worthless Yankee cowards and that cotton would force Britain and France to support southern independence.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Their political idiocy and their moral obtuseness led the people of their state into a disastrous and ruinous war, made South Carolina the most hated state in the Union (both North and South blamed the Carolina hotheads for the horrible war), hugely weakened the South’s ability to defend its legitimate economic and social interests against the predatory North, deepened the racial gulf that was already the state’s greatest limitation and curse and left South Carolina backward and poor for the next 100 years.
So what did some South Carolinians do to mark the 150th anniversary of the dumbest move the state ever made? Have a ball, naturally. Black tie. (Black crepe would have been more appropriate.)
Like all the other white kids of my generation in the South, I grew up with the stories of the Lost Cause and the heroic, doomed struggles of the Civil War. I honor the courage and the grandeur of tragic figures like Robert E. Lee; I am amazed and awed by the determination of the South’s soldiers and civilians in their hopeless struggle against impossible odds. As an eleven year old I cried like a baby when Gone With The Wind swept through our local movie theaters on a return engagement, though I was more interested in the burning of Atlanta than in Scarlett’s schemes to get Rhett Butler back.
Over the years I continue to read Civil War history, visit battlefields from time to time, and as editor of The American Interest Online I’ve been helping to organize our Civil War commemoration at The Long Recall. The Civil War matters, and being a Southerner (though most of my adult life has been spent north of the Mason-Dixon line), the shared identity that comes out of that war and the hundred years of pain that followed it helps shape me.
But all that study and reflection reinforces the case against the “Fire Eaters” who brought such misery and destruction on their native country and state. No significant group of political leaders in American history was so misguided, so arrogant, so destructive and so plain wrong as the “Founding Fathers” of the Confederacy. The Constitution they wrote was a disaster; the inefficiencies and political infighting of the Confederacy contributed mightily to its defeat. The president they elected, Jefferson Davis, was rigid and self-righteous. While Abraham Lincoln grew from year to year, Davis shrank in office. His diplomatic appointments were incompetent; his foreign strategy was self-contradictory and unrealistic; while his integrity and devotion to his cause cannot be impeached, his military and political judgments were deeply flawed and he was not in Lincoln’s class as a statesman, a thinker or an orator.
Real leaders would have figured out a way to save the South, not ruin it. A gradual program of compensated emancipation (with Yankee taxpayers putting up the cash to free the South’s slaves) would have helped the South transition to a new economy and ended the horror of slavery without a war. A thoughtful approach to internal improvements and economic development could have helped the South invest the proceeds from compensated emancipation in the railroads and factories that could have ignited the industrialization of the south in 1870 rather than 1940.
Today the South is infinitely more forward looking and realistic than it was in 1860. The wounds of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and three quarters of a century of economic exploitation by the victorious North are healing — though they are by no means healed.
Fifty years ago South Carolina was celebrating the centennial of the Civil War by fighting the Civil Rights movement. The state has come a long way since then; fifty years from now the bicentennial of the Civil War will, I think, find South Carolina an even greater state than she is today. Richer, better educated, more at peace with the past and more optimistic about the future: that is the direction in which South Carolina has been traveling since 1960.
My grandparents’ house in Florence, South Carolina was across the street from a park named for Henry Timrod, or “the poet laureate of the Confederacy” as he is sometimes known. Timrod, as big a political ninny as any South Carolina produced in those halcyon days, was an enthusiastic supporter of secession and the Confederate cause. The martial enthusiasm of his wartime poems (“Carolina!”, “Ethnogenesis“, “Charleston“) was widely credited for persuading young men to enlist and stiffening the South’s spine. Poor health forced him to leave military service and put an end to a brief stint as a war correspondent. (He would die of tuberculosis in 1867 before he reached the age of 40.)
In southern lore, Timrod is generally found carefully wrapped in Spanish moss, looming among the magnolias and the moonlight as an emblem of the romanticism of the Lost Cause. His ode to the Confederate dead, originally sung as families too impoverished by the war to put marble markers on the tombs of fallen soldiers put flowers on their graves, was a touchstone of Southern memory and mourning for decades.
But the side of Timrod I admire most (other than his determination to live a literary life despite the ensuing poverty and hardship) was sterner and more forward looking. This is the Timrod South Carolina could still use today.
Writing in 1866, Timrod, looked back on the bitterness and disaster of the past year — and forward to a better future. Isn’t it time for you to be over, he said addressing the old year of 1865 (and by extension the whole Civil War). No moonlight and magnolias here; Timrod looks forward to a new year, a new future, and urges the South to move on.
It’s a poem that is still worth reflecting on today; 150 years after the terrible and tragic error of secession, South Carolina is well into the future that Timrod dimly foresaw:
A time of peaceful prayer,
Of law, love, labor, honest loss and gain —
These are the visions of the coming reign
Now floating to them on this wintry air.
Despite South Carolina’s reputation for political quirkiness and ultraconservatism, things have changed. Timrod’s home town of Charleston has elected a Black Republican to Congress. South Carolina’s newly elected governor is of South Asian background. The third ranking member of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives is a Black Democrat born and educated in the state. The South is moving on and moving past the tragic past, enabling us to regard southern history as, amid the ruin of his dreams and health Henry Timrod did in the following poem:
1866. Addressed To The New Year
Art thou not glad to close
Thy wearied eyes, O saddest child of Time,
Eyes which have looked on every mortal crime,
And swept the piteous round of mortal woes?
In dark Plutonian caves,
Beneath the lowest deep, go, hide thy head;
Or earth thee where the blood that thou hast shed
May trickle on thee from thy countless graves!
Take with thee all thy gloom
And guilt, and all our griefs, save what the breast,
Without a wrong to some dear shadowy guest,
May not surrender even to the tomb.
No tear shall weep thy fall,
When, as the midnight bell doth toll thy fate,
Another lifts the sceptre of thy state,
And sits a monarch in thine ancient hall.
HIM all the hours attend,
With a new hope like morning in their eyes;
Him the fair earth and him these radiant skies
Hail as their sovereign, welcome as their friend.
Him, too, the nations wait;
“O lead us from the shadow of the Past,”
In a long wail like this December blast,
They cry, and, crying, grow less desolate.
How he will shape his sway
They ask not — for old doubts and fears will cling —
And yet they trust that, somehow, he will bring
A sweeter sunshine than thy mildest day.
Beneath his gentle hand
They hope to see no meadow, vale, or hill
Stained with a deeper red than roses spill,
When some too boisterous zephyr sweeps the land.
A time of peaceful prayer,
Of law, love, labor, honest loss and gain —
These are the visions of the coming reign
Now floating to them on this wintry air.