Lost Causes

How We Re-Enacted the Civil War When I Was a Kid

TEMPORARILY UNLOCKED

In 1957, when the U.S. decided to celebrate the upcoming centennial of the Civil War, it ran into a whole mess of problems, which seems far from surprising, given the persistence, 100 years after the war began, of issues coming straight out of the war—racial segregation, lynchings and other murders of black people, black impoverishment, violation of voting rights, racial discrimination in housing, and the many related issues that were even then becoming politically explosive. It’s kind of amazing that the country’s leaders saw commemorating the war as a smart idea at all.

But for more than fifty of the intervening years, a national project of rapprochement between the white North and the white South had been underway. Many know that at the end of the 19th century, with defeat of Reconstruction and the imposition of racial segregation in the former Confederate states, a “Lost Cause” revival began, mythologizing the supposed nobility of the secessionists’ aspirations. In the 20th century, statues of defeated generals, Confederate flags flying at statehouses, and other official public statements fostered nostalgia in white southerners for their ancestors’ supposedly valiant defense of secession while sending a 24/7 message to black southerners, couched in military terms, that white supremacism was to remain the order of the day.

Many know too that an organization called the Daughters of the Confederacy played an important role in promoting Lost Cause iconography, but I didn’t know—until the other day, when the writer Robert Sullivan pointed it out to me—that New York City played a big role in the Daughters’ impact, and the Daughters played a big role in New York City. I’ll link in “Further Reading,” below, to some material on that startling fact, which probably shouldn’t have startled me, since I knew New York had a long, tight relationship with the southern slaveocracy (I’ll link to some stuff on that, too). Still, it’s all pretty startling.

The larger point, to me, has to do with the process by which the North bought into and even to some degree authored the Lost Cause story. And I’ll be writing more on that too.

For today, just considering the nature of the national Civil War centennial, I think it’s important to remember that well before 1957, a complacent idea prevailed in certain establishment circles that fundamental conflicts underlying the war had been resolved, and a romantic idea prevailed in both the North and the South that the war, while tragic—maybe because it was tragic—had brought out the nobility of both sides. When the centennial process began, celebrating the Civil War as an archetypically American story, and a white American story at that, while more or less forgetting about its realities, had been largely taken for granted in the official American imagination.

I’m only starting to dig into this history—the history of a celebration of history—because I’ve only recently realized that it had a major impact on my imagination when I was a kid. (It’s really all about me.) But here’s one grim story I’ve come across, in an article by Robert J. Cook (it’s linked below), that puts the whole thing in a striking perspective.

For fairly obvious political reasons, in 1957 both Congress and President Eisenhower were eager to parcel out all of the real commemorative authority to the individual states. The notion the everybody white had been getting along in mutual esteem for one another’s ancestral nobility was fake, of course, and in real life things were getting tense. That same year, the President sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce federal school desegregation. So the national commission was to be mainly a series of delegated meetings of the hodgepodge of state commissions, which had varying and indeed conflicting ideas of how to celebrate.

The southern commissions took the centennial as an opportunity to amp up the Lost Cause mood. South Carolina actually put a fireworks re-bombardment of Fort Sumter!. There were some pretty oddball battle re-enactments.

The northern states’ approaches varied. According to an article by Michael Murtagh, linked below—I think it’s an undergraduate paper—New York began with the pretty anodyne theme “reconciliation,” but it soon shifted to “emancipation.”

Especially notable was New Jersey’s placing Madaline A. Williams, a black woman, on its state centennial commission. She wasn’t the only black person serving on a state’s centennial commission, but she was one of the few, and in 1961, in conjunction with the South Carolina celebration of the bombardment of Sumter, the national commission, including the New Jersey delegation, met in Charleston, so you may be seeing where this story is going.

The Charleston hotel where the commission members were staying refused to accommodate Madaline Williams.

That’s the thing. The country was trying to celebrate a national Civil War centennial when states were still legally segregated. A month after the re-creation of the attack on Fort Sumter, the Freedom Rides began: civil disobedience to integrate long-distance bus service in the South. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Not until ’64 did the Civil Rights Act prohibit racial discrimination in public facilities.

Then, in April of ‘65, 100 years after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox effectively ended the Civil War, the national Civil War centennial commemoration came to an end too. Three years later, King would be assassinated. What a weird time to be growing up, I sometimes think. But I guess a lot of times are like that.

Back to Charleston, in ‘61. I can’t prove it, but it’s dollars to doughnuts that Williams knew she’d be barred from the hotel, and that the New Jersey commission was looking to make a point. It demanded equal hotel access for Williams. The heads of the national commission said they couldn’t interfere in a state’s practices. President Kennedy publicly weighed in against the commission’s position, but South Carolina really was segregated, by law. The hotel wasn’t going to admit Williams.

Instead, the whole convention moved to a U.S. Navy base, which was desegregated by federal law. Some saw that move as a victory for racial equality, and maybe it was, sort of, but Cook’s article suggests that the whole centennial commemoration was basically a series of such embarrassments, a flop, kind of a lost cause itself.

He also points this out:

The much-derided commercialism, moreover, generated real popular interest in the Civil War. American children in particular were excited by the war’s raised media profile, the sudden appearance of war-related souvenirs, historian Bruce Catton’s highly accessible books and articles on the conflict, and family visits to the battlefields.

That’s all I remember.

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Further Reading

Cook’s article has other good stuff too.

What I think is an undergraduate paper on New York’s Civil War centennial commission.

 “…the Times, which was purchased in 1896 by Adolph Ochs, whose mother, a U.D.C. member, was reportedly buried with a Confederate flag”: Robert Sullivan on the Daughters of the Confederacy and New York City.

I recently wrote this breezy overview of the history of New York City secessionism, with reference to the mayor’s effort to ally the city to the Confederacy.

My essay on Confederate statues in the Capitol Building.