Thursday, July 9, 2015

James McBride Dabbs on Confederate Defeat and the Lost Cause




James McBride Dabbs (1896-1970), writer, teacher, theologian, and civil rights leader, was a native of Dabbs Crossroads, near Mayesville, in Sumter County, South Carolina. He was a briefly an English professor at the University of South Carolina, then a longtime professor at Coker College; was for many years a farmer at Rip Raps, his plantation at Dabbs Crossroads; and was a Presbyterian lay leader. From 1957 to 1963 Dabbs was president of the Southern Regional Council, a progressive civil rights—and human rights—organization.

His books The Southern Heritage (1958) and Who Speaks for the South? (1964) are essential interpretations of the history, culture, society, and mind of the South from its colonial origins to the mid-twentieth century. His personal and spiritual autobiography The Road Home (1960) is also valuable as well. The best study of Dabbs’s life, writings, and significance is Thomas Johnson’s two-volume dissertation, “James McBride Dabbs: A Life Story” (University of South Carolina, 1980, unpublished).

Dabbs completed the manuscript for his book Haunted By God at Rip Raps on May 30, 1970, saying, “There it is. I’ve done all I’m going to do to it.” He died later that day. It was edited by his widow Edith Mitchell Dabbs and published in 1972.

Dabbs’s assessment of the white South and its fierce attachment to the Civil War—and to the Lost Cause narrative it created to help it deal with defeat—is astonishingly relevant today, in the summer of 2015, in the week the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds: 


The South, which lasted as a nation for only four short years and which died at Appomattox, was immediately resurrected as a dream. . . . The Civil War was fought almost exclusively on Southern soil. It was lost. Out of this futile defense of the homeland, and out of its destruction, there arose in the mind of the white South the shining image of the Lost Cause. This was a highly romanticized concept, but the image, though slowly fading, has influenced the South for a hundred years. There arose a memory of a unified South which had in fact never existed. It became the role of the white Southerner to remember and honor this imagined past and as far as possible to keep it unchanged.

James McBride Dabbs, Haunted By God (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1972)


This admonition, FORTY-FIVE LONG YEARS after he wrote it, is something all too many white South Carolinians, and all too many white Southerners, still do not understand.

God grant that we may all learn from our separate and shared histories, and move forward into a bright future that learns from them rather than clings desperately to them.