How the War Is Remembered....

Over on Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory flog, the discussion has been about some historians at Liberty University, and how they downplay slavery, etc.

In a slight departure from the other commenters, a new person to the blog said she grew up in the Midwest where the Civil War was like the Spanish American war and others --  they just studied it and that was the end of it. When she moved to North Carolina, she was surprised by how differently people remembered the civil war and slavery and all that. It wasn't something they just studied and dismissed. (This is a very short recap of a rather long comment, and thus not comprehensive and complete.)

Levin thank her for posting and said things were "changing" in the South, slavery is slowing being acknowledged, etc.

I thought I had knowledge, info and a perspective that might be helpful to the new commenter, so I left a comment of my own. I seriously doubt it will be cleared, but you never know; Simpson let three of my comments through at XRoads recently. 

Here are my thoughts left at Kevin's flog:

Ms. K---, I would suggest that it isn't just the war that Southerners perceive/experience/remember differently, but what happened after it -- in fact, especially what happened after it -- until well into the 20th century, and that certainly influences how they remember the war.

Today, the focus is almost exclusively on blacks and their terrible experience after the war, while whites who also had terrible experiences get little ink and little thought, though it is crucial to how the war is remembered.

For example, "sharecropper" is synonymous with "African American" for many people, but there were more white sharecroppers than black ones. James Webb's Born Fighting notes that of the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white. And though their experience is downplayed, ignored, dismissed (and sometimes "justified"), that experience plays an inescapable part in shaping civil war memory in the South.

Effects similar to those of sharecropping accompanied the exploitation of workers in industry (coal mining, timber, textiles) that occurred with the creation of the "company town" (company housing, company store, company money, i.e., scrip) which kept workers in a form of economic near-slavery.

The extreme poverty so prevalent in the South created widespread nutritional deficiency diseases such as pellagra and hookworm, in the decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the effects of which contributed to the false stereotypes of Southerners as dimwitted and lazy, which persist to this day.

Keeping the South and its people poor occurred by other methods -- for example, discriminatory freight rates that prevented industry from developing and kept wages low (see: http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cescott/freight.html). This was a policy of private industry (the railroads) but permitted by the federal government, and it took federal authority to end it.

Then there was the debt run up by carpetbagger legislatures that taxpayers were saddled with for generations. (I may be mistaken about this -- I'm going from memory of something I read years ago -- but South Carolina's carpetbagger debt was not paid off until the 1960s.) So there was very little money for infrastructure, public education, etc. -- and then Southerners were ridiculed not only for being "lazy" but for being poor and uneducated.

Every economic tumble the USA experienced fell especially hard on the already poverty-stricken South. All of this, and more, had a direct bearing on how the war was -- and still is -- remembered in the South.

This wasn't the case for a few years, or even a few decades, after the war -- but for about four or five generations. For example, the Interstate Commerce Commission did not end the discriminatory freight rates until 1953, when I was four years old, (though of course I didn't know this at the time). The point is simply to show how long such circumstances lasted, and how much time they had to exert influence on remembering the war.

If you are going to go with current scholarship, which focuses almost exclusively on slavery before the war, and blacks afterward, understanding how the war is remembered by others in the South will will likely elude you.