Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 1: Losers and Winners

Insurrections then and now

Since 2004 I’ve been publishing daily posts every April as a counter-celebration of Confederate Heritage Month, a neo-Confederate observance that is part of the white supremacist, “Lost Cause” account of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed it. That narrative still forms the basis for such white-racist revisionist accounts of American history.

US states that have officially celebrated Confederate Heritage Month in this century include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. All of them former states of the treasonous Confederate States of America in 1861-1865.

I’ve engaged both in debunking neo-Confederate claims and in discussing major events in American history that provide important insights into the problems with neo-Confederate/white supremacist approaches to history.

This year, I’m starting off with a link to a recent post by Bob McElvaine, who is retiring this year as professor of history at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS. I’m proud to say that I was one of his undergraduate students once upon a time.

In “Will the Losers Again Be Later to Win?”¹, he draws a parallel between the treasonous, white-supremacist insurrectionists of the 1860s and those of the 2020s. He begins by noting the peculiar fact that although the Confederate slaveholders’ side lost the Civil War, the former Confederates succeeded in establishing their own self-justifying narrative as the dominant one in the US for decades:

It is often said that history is a story told by the winners. Yet, stunningly, by a few decades after the Civil War and for well over a half century thereafter, it came to be the losers’ stories of “a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields,” moonlight and magnolias, kindly masters and happy slaves, a glorious “Lost Cause,” and a horrible period of “Black Reconstruction” that were widely accepted as accurate history.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nation was reunited on the basis of a tacit armistice in which the South accepted that the Union is indissoluble and much of the rest of the white country accepted the southern belief in the innate inferiority of people of African ancestry. That acceptance was facilitated by the popularity of the pseudoscience of social Darwinism and a fabricated story that Reconstruction, rather than the largely successful progressive period that it was, had been a monstrous time of rule by ignorant black people. [my emphasis]

He also describes how the Trumpistas are operating with a similar goal of restoring a white-supremacist narrative of American history to dominance:

Those who seek to turn us back appreciate that control over how the past is perceived goes a long way toward gaining control over the present and future, and today they are once again engaged in an all-out effort to misrepresent the American past.

Calls to “Make America Great Again” and “Take Back America” mean to take America back in two senses: back from those who are not white or not male and back to the time when straight white males were in charge. It should not have been surprising that, as part of this overall quest to effect a second restoration of white man’s rule, those who want to regress proposed to restore the ignorance of American history that had pre­vailed before 1964. The sociopolitical heirs of the 1865 losers are again attempting to rewrite the American past of the nineteenth century as a lie—and they are doing the same with the recent past, most notably by rewriting the January 6 Insurrection as a lie.

In October 2020, Donald Trump announced that he would create a 1776 Commission to combat “anti-American historical revisionism” and promote “patriotic education.” “Patriotic education” is what authoritarian regimes engage in.

Photo: Hiram Rhodes Revels, US Senator from Mississippi (1870–1871), the first African-American Senator. The Senate seat he filled was once occupied by Jefferson Davis.

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A note on resources:

I’m a big fan of Britannica Online as a convenient factual reference point for historical events. Their articles are continually updated and provide references to scholarly works. Many of the articles are written by noted scholars in the particular field. And it’s easy to access (although some of the longer articles are partially behind subscription.)

For this year’s posts, I’m going to rely heavily on John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, first published in 1947. It has gone through nine editions so far. I’m working from the 8th 2003 edition updated with co-author Alfred A. Moss, Jr. The most recent (9th) edition was updated with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in 2010.²

1. McElvaine, Robert (2023): Will the Losers Again Be Later to Win? Today through the Lens of Yesterday 02/18/2023. (Accessed: 2023-18-03).

Will the Losers Again Be Later to Win?

2. Wikipedia (2023): John Hope Franklin 03/05/2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Hope_Franklin&oldid=1143054419> (Accessed: 2023-24-03).