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is Thomas Johnson’s two-volume dissertation, “James McBride Dabbs: A Life Story” (University of South Carolina, 1980, unpublished).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.

On the Confederate Battle Flag and the Legacies of Slavery, Secession, and the Civil War

Some thoughts from this week:

 

Monday, June 22, 2015
 
IT'S TIME, South Carolina.

(Many would say long past time.)
 
It's time for the Confederate battle flag to come off the grounds of the South Carolina State House.

Let's work together to see that it does.
 
As you consider everything you are seeing and hearing and reading from various news outlets of all kinds, everything you are hearing and saying in conversations in person and online, you can learn a great deal about the Confederate flag(s) and their historic and present contexts from these two fine books--one on the flag generally and one on the flag in South Carolina:  

John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard University Press, 2005)
 
and  

K. Michael Prince, Rally 'Round The Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (University of South Carolina Press, 2004)

We should all strive to educate ourselves and each other about the multiple histories and meanings of this flag from 1861 to 2015, especially about the reasons this flag has been so visible again in the past 70 years after being more a historical artifact than anything else from 1865 to 1945 or so. We MUST examine our own ancestries and personal histories and do the hard work necessary to understand what they mean not just to us and our families, but to our fellow man. Doing that can only help us understand ourselves, each other, and our state and nation better.  


Tuesday, June 23, 2015  

Why did Southern states secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861? Read Charles Dew's clear and penetrating interpretation of what the Southern secession commissioners said and wrote at the time, making their case not just for the act of secession but for establishing a new nation based on the protection and perpetuation of its "institutions"--and one especially: Slavery.  

"The speeches and letters of the Southern commissioners of 1860-61 . . . reveal a great deal about secession and the coming of the Civil War. I believe deeply that the story these documents tell is one that all of us, northerners and southerners, black and white, need to confront as we try to understand our past and move toward a future in which a fuller commitment to decency and racial justice will be part of our shared experience."  

Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2001)  


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Father Abram J. Ryan's poem "The Conquered Banner," first published in the summer of 1865, was written to lament the defeat of the Confederacy, to honor the memory of the soldiers who died for it, and to express the feelings of the white Southerners, veterans and civilians alike, who believed that their cause was just.  

The first few lines of "The Conquered Banner" are appropriate today more than ever--and I share them here with no intention WHATSOEVER of endorsing the rest of Ryan's interpretation or memorializing the Confederacy, but in the hopes that these words from 1865 can resonate 150 years later.  

It is up to us as a state, a region, and a nation to do what is right.  

"Furl that Banner, for 'tis weary;
Round its staff 'tis drooping dreary;
Furl it, fold it, it is best."
 

Friday, June 26, 2015  

I have said for many years that I am a Georgian by birth, but a South 
Carolinian by choice.
 
My heart aches for the families of the nine gentle souls murdered at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, for their church family, for the city of Charleston, and for my adopted state.  

I am also, however, proud of what my adopted state and her citizens are showing the nation and the world, and hopeful for her future.  

I am a professional historian, with advanced degrees in the discipline and many years’ experience as a scholar, lecturer, public historian, and professor, first at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and now at Newberry College.

I am, furthermore, a Civil War historian.  

I have studied the war (and the Confederacy) all my life—from the time I could first read, at the age of 5, when I read my first book on Abraham Lincoln in kindergarten. I was soon avidly interested in the Civil War (and in history generally). In 1972, at the age of 14, I decided to major in history in college, and to go on to graduate school for my master’s and doctoral degrees, and to pursue a career as a professional historian and a college or university professor.  

I have NEVER been, and am not now, a latter-day- or neo-Confederate, as someone who identifies personally with the motives that caused most of the Southern states to break up the Union and fight a bloody civil war.  

I am the descendant of men and women living in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina from the time of the American Revolution. I have some ancestors who were slaveholders, and some who weren’t. I have several ancestors who were Confederate soldiers: a Georgian who lost a leg at Fredericksburg, a North Carolinian who died and is buried in a prisoner-of-war-camp at Johnson’s Island, a Georgian who served for three years in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and others.  

I do not know why each of these men joined the Confederate army and fought for the Confederacy. I have no way of knowing, and even if I did their motives would not influence my own beliefs.  

I DO, however, know a great deal about the impulses behind secession and the war secession brought about, about the motives of white Southerners who sought to establish an independent Southern nation, one based on the protection and perpetuation of its “institutions”—and one institution especially: Slavery. I have said that, written that, and taught that for long as I have been a historian. I always will. All anyone has to do to understand why is to read the spoken and written words of the men who worked so hard, in some cases for more than thirty years, to dissolve the Union. They were not equivocal, they did not leave any doubt for their reasons—in that moment—in doing so.  

Make no mistake.  

I am a historian OF the Civil War, and of the Confederacy. I am NOT a Confederate—in fact, I do not believe it is possible to be a Confederate, in 2015, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, and do not believe it is a good thing to embrace the cause of the Confederacy (as opposed to studying and learning from its history) in today’s America, in any way.  

The Charleston Massacre was not the act of a sick person, but an evil one. This was racial terrorism, pure and simple: pure evil, simply acknowledged. The murderer left behind explanations for why he did what he did, and he made it abundantly clear that he used the Confederate battle flag as a symbol for his hate and the hate of others like him, as a call for unity to those who agreed with him and a warning to those he hated.  

In 2000 I attended the “Take It Down!” rally at the South Carolina State House, the rally that called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the State House dome. I did so as a private citizen and did not speak out publicly then, because I was a historian at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and did not want the public to think that I was speaking for that agency in any official capacity.

I believed later that year, after the eventual compromise to remove the flag from atop the dome and place it at the Confederate monument, that it was a halfway measure and that removing the flag from the State House grounds altogether would be best for our state, our region, and our nation. I did, however, accept the work of the South Carolina General Assembly in forging that compromise and was further encouraged by the design and construction of a monument on the State House grounds honoring and interpreting the significance of African-American history (and African Americans from the most prominent to the unknown) in the Palmetto State.  

After the murder of those nine gentle souls (to be honest, including the ASSASSINATION of a state senator targeted because he fought for civil rights in the South Carolina Senate, in addition to his work as a man of God both in and out of his pulpit at Emanuel A.M.E. Church) there is no longer any justification for the State of South Carolina to continue flying the Confederate battle flag at the State House. The State House is the seat of state government and a place belonging to ALL South Carolinians. That flag does not belong there—not even beside the Confederate monument erected there in 1879.  

IT IS TIME, to quote Judge J. Waties Waring, a United States District Court judge in Charleston, (a native South Carolinian and the grandson of a Confederate officer) who issued some of the most important rulings of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s—rulings that went far beyond the state to be nationally significant—“for South Carolina to rejoin the Union.”  

IT IS TIME, long past time, for the Confederate battle flag to be displayed not at state houses and state capitols, not at other governmental buildings and institutions, but in museums, in cemeteries, at Civil War battlefields: In its proper historical context, with a clear interpretation of what white Southerners said and wrote AT THE TIME about why they dissolved the Union and started the war.  

Since I am no longer a historian at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and I do not have to be concerned that my personal views might be misunderstood as official views of the state of South Carolina, I can now speak my mind and my conscience much more freely, not only in private but also in public.  

I have already done so this week, sharing some of my own thoughts on Facebook and Twitter and sharing other historians’—and journalists’—interpretations on the complicated history of race in America and on slavery, the Civil War, and the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of heritage AND hate. In doing so, I am trying to encourage all citizens, of South Carolina, the South, the nation, and the world, to educate themselves and each other. As I posted on Facebook earlier this week,  

We MUST examine our own ancestries and personal histories and do the hard work necessary to understand what they mean not just to us and our families, but to our fellow man. Doing that can only help us understand ourselves, each other, and our state and nation better.  

May God grant that we will all work together to do so.

The Art of Chasing History

What is history? History is the absence of the present. Or perhaps it is the presence of an absence. Either way, the art of chasing history comes down to this: always arriving somewhere a little too late. Always showing up just in time to learn that you missed something significant. History is all about the missing of important things; a historic marker is nothing more than a little sign to let passersby know that something happened, something worth remembering happened on or near the spot on which they now stand, but they missed it. If only they'd been here earlier . . .

Richard Rubin, "The Missing," The Southern Review (July 1996)

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It is the soul of art, alone, which binds periods and places together.

William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction (Wiley and Putnam, 1846)

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History is always just an approximation of the past.

Mark Bowden, reviewing Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers,

The New York Times Book Review (July 18, 2004)

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History is not like a cluster of grapes from which the rotten ones can be neatly discarded.

Benjamin Schwartz, "What Jefferson Helps To Explain," 

The Atlantic (March 1997) 

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Of our history, though we cannot change it, we must still try for a true accounting.

Wendell Berry, "American Imagination and the Civil War,"

Imagination in Place: Essays (Counterpoint, 2010)

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For a historian, there is no substitute for going to the actual place where occurred the events one writes about to help one describe them in that concrete, vivid manner.

James M. McPherson, "Gettysburg," in William E. Leuchtenberg, editor, American Places: Encounters with History 
(Oxford University Press, 2000)

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I believe that history is made by people. It is not made by cosmic forces. It's not ordained or preordained. I want to tell it in terms of people.

Stanley Karnow, in Brian Lamb, Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas (Times Books, 1997)

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Welcome to a new blog, The Art of Chasing History, which gets its title from the Richard Rubin short story quoted at the top of this post.  I am an Assistant Professor of History and Director of the College Archives at Newberry College in Newberry, South Carolina, a small liberal-arts college affiliated with the Lutheran church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).

This blog will feature posts on the study and practice of history in all its forms, and will also serve as a public forum in which my students can present some of their explorations into history, public history, historiography, historical biography, and related fields.