Confederate Heritage Month 2023, April 8: Mississippi's Gov. Tater Tot proclaims official Confederate Heritage Month

Four years in a row for Tater

This year Confederate Heritage Month is once again officially A Thing in my native state of Mississippi. Gov. Tate Reeves, aka, Gov. Tater Tot (it’s a Southern thang¹), issued his fourth annual proclamation in a row of the official commemoration.

Tater tots (pronounced “TAY-tr”)

The news article on it by Ashton Pittman gives some background on this truly misbegotten practice.² (I’ll return to 1619-Project-related commentary tomorrow.)

Pittman notes that the proclamation was posted on a website of a local branch of the far-right Sons of Confederate Veterans group.

The group has posted Reeves’ proclamations annually since 2021; the R.E. Lee Camp 239 SCV Facebook group posted the 2020 proclamation. Without SCV groups posting the proclamations and the Jackson Free Press and Mississippi Free Press reporting on them, they could have gone unnoticed as they did before 2016; neither the governor nor any other state official publicizes the proclamations or posts them on any state websites or social-media pages.

Reeves defended issuing the proclamations in 2021.

“For the last 30 years, five Mississippi governors—Republicans and Democrats alike—have signed a proclamation recognizing the statutory state holiday and identifying April as Confederate Heritage Month,” he said in a statement to WAPT at the time. “Gov. Reeves also signed the proclamation because he believes we can all learn from our history.”

This has always been a bad habit. But this is not a tradition that goes back to 1880s or something. Its origin was more recent:

After [Republican Gov. Kirk] Fordice became Mississippi’s first Republican governor in a century while courting the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens and criticizing efforts to atone for the state’s racist past, he issued the inaugural Confederate Heritage Month proclamation at the request of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1993.

Since then, one Democratic governor and three Republican governors have followed Fordice’s lead. In the 30 years since, only one governor has ever skipped issuing a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation. Despite issuing them for his first seven years in office between 2011 and 2018, former Gov. Bryant did not issue a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation in 2019, his last year in office, opting instead for a “Month of Unity” proclamation on behalf of a Christian organization.

At least the Democratic governor referenced, Ronnie Musgrove, now says it was a mistake:

The language in Reeves’ Confederate Heritage Month proclamation uses much of the same language as one that former Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who served from 2000 to 2004, issued in April 2000.

Reached for comment Wednesday morning, Musgrove told the Mississippi Free Press that Confederate Heritage Month is “something that should not continue in today’s world.”

“I cannot say why the practice started, but it was one that should never have been started,” the former governor said. “It was one that I should not have signed and it should have ended a long time ago.”

And Pittman is spot-on in this characterization:

Though Confederate Heritage groups like SCV promote a whitewashed version of the South’s role in the Civil War that has often made its way into textbooks in the state and throughout the country, the historical record makes clear that slavery was the primary cause of the Union’s split and the subsequent Civil War.

He also notes that one of the dumb and dishonest tropes promoted by the Lost Cause narrative is that the secession of the Confederate states had nothing to do with slavery. And that Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession of 1861 explicitly links the secession cause to preserving slavery.

After Lincoln won the 1860 Presidential election, Mississippi Gov. John Pettus called for the legislature to authorize a secession convention. He seemed to think slavery had a whole lot to do with it:

With the rhetoric out of the way, Pettus got down to his basic arguments. “The existence or the abolition of African slavery in the Southern States is now up for a final settlement,” he warned the legislature. He spoke of how Northerners had deemed slavery “sinful and must be destroyed” and how they dictated, with the limitation of expansion, that the South must choose “whether it shall be a peaceable and gradual abolition, or speedy and violent.” Pettus declared, “these are the hard terms offered to fifteen States of this Confederacy—as if they were conquered and not co-equal States.” As for Lincoln’s election, Pettus warned that letting the Northerners run the nation “would be as reasonable to expect the steamship to make a successful voyage across the Atlantic with crazy men for engineers, as to hope for a prosperous future for the South under Black Republican rule.”³ [my emphasis]

Donna Ladd of the Mississippi Free Press discussed this bad state habittwo years ago⁴:

1. Tater tots. Wikipedia 04/02/2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tater_tots&oldid=1147852801> (Accessed 2023-06-04).

2. Pittman, Ashton (2023): Gov. Reeves Declares Confederate Heritage Month, A 30-Year-Old Mississippi Tradition. Jackson Free Press 04/04/2023. <https://www.mississippifreepress.org/32351/gov-reeves-declares-confederate-heritage-month-a-30-year-old-mississippi-tradition> (Accessed 2023-06-04).

3. Smith, Timothy B. (2014): The Mississippi Secession Convention: Delegates and Deliberations in Politics and War, 1861–1865, 16. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

4. Mississippi Governors Have Quietly Declared Confederate Heritage Month - for Years-Zerlina. MSNBC On Peacock YouTube channel 04/14/2021. (Accessed 2023-08-04).