How great literature can change your life

Lt. Col. Chamberlain and Maine regiment at Gettysburg

Tuesday

I have a love-hate relationship with the American south, not unlike James Joyce’s ambivalent relationship with Ireland. We moved to Sewanee, Tennessee when I was three, and I fled from it at 18, appalled by the racism. Yet after spending fifty years in blue states (Minnesota and Maryland) and a blue city (Atlanta), I’m returning to my childhood home.

This time, I’m determined to understand it better, even as I continue to witness overt and unapologetic expressions of racism on a weekly basis. To that end, I have just completed Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s fictional account of the Battle of Gettysburg.

As this is a literary rather than a history blog, I won’t go into the historical material other than to note that I was surprised to see how badly Robert E. Lee comes off. The North’s Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and John Buford and the South’s James Longstreet are the heroes. Instead, I focus on a point that is relevant today: although the war was clearly about slavery, no one on the southern side will admit it. Instead, everyone claims that it is about freedom (white freedom, of course) and states’ rights.

Today, no one in the GOP will admit that, when they say freedom, they mean white entitlement.

Shaara makes clear that the elephant in the southern room is America’s original sin. As Chamberlain’s brother puts it,

“When you ask them prisoners, they never talk about slavery. But, Lawrence, how do you explain that? What else is the war about?”

Chamberlain shook his head.

“If it weren’t for the slaves, there’d never have been no war, now would there?”

“No,” Chamberlain said.

“Well then, I don’t care how much political fast-talking you hear, that’s what it’s all about and that’s what them fellers died for, and I tell you, Lawrence, I don’t understand it at all.”

We see the southern generals reluctant to talk about slavery as they debate with an Englishman. George Pickett explains what sets them off:

“Well, Jim Kemper kept needling our English friend about why they didn’t come and join in with us, it being in their interest and all, and the Englishman said that it was a very touchy subject, since most Englishmen figured the war was all about, ah, slavery, and then old Kemper got a bit outraged and had to explain how wrong he was and Sorrel and some others joined in, but no harm done.”

 “Damn fool,” Kemper said. “He still thinks it’s about slavery.”

Note how this debate never acknowledges that the southern economy relies on involuntary servitude:

Longstreet caught the conclusion of Sorrel’s sentence.

“…know that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Every government, everywhere. And, sir, let me make this plain: We do not consent. We will never consent.”

They stood up as Longstreet approached. Sorrel’s face was flushed. Jim Kemper was not finished with the argument, Longstreet or not. To Fremantle he went on: “You must tell them, and make it plain, that what we are fighting for is our freedom from the rule of what is to us a foreign government. That’s all we want and that’s what this war is all about. We established this country in the first place with strong state governments just for that reason, to avoid a central tyranny.”

Now contrast this vision with Chamberlain’s:

The faith itself was simple; he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun HERE. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all the former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.

To this, Chamberlain’s Irish companion adds a more personal understanding of the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal”:

What I’m fighting for is the right to prove I’m a better man than many….There’s many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don’t think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice. ‘Tis why I’m here. I’ll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved. I’m Kilrain, and I God damn all gentlemen. I don’t know who me father was, and I don’t give a damn. There’s only one aristocracy, and that’s right here—” he tapped his white skull with a thick finger…

And further on:

“The point is that we have a country here where the past cannot keep a good man in chains, and that’s the nature of the war. It’s the aristocracy I’m after. All that lovely, plumed, stinking chivalry. The people who look at you like a piece of filth, a coachroach, ah.” His face twitched to stark bitterness. “I tell you, Colonel, we got to win this war.”

We have a version of this same war going on today. Many who vote Republican do not benefit economically from doing so, just as poor southern whites did not own slaves. But feeling superior to slaves was part of their core identity, and today I’m witnessing a comparable need. Since moving to Tennessee, I have encountered several instances of people–those who come to do odd jobs around our house–complaining about lazy or dirty blacks. I sense that they do so to bolster their self-respect, which relies on there being someone beneath them. Such sentiments explain why today’s economic elite, much like the South’s 19^th century patrician class, can get them to dance to their tune.

As Washington Post’s Philip Bump put it, in Donald Trump’s two track strategy “the rich get richer and the poor get distracted.” Only the strategy precedes Trump, having been operative for the GOP since Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

Therefore I think Toni Morrison is right to attribute Trumpism to white panic. We’re still fighting the Civil War, with our millionaires once again playing the race card–ordering Pickett charges–to protect their privilege and wealth. Meanwhile, white liberals in the mode of Chamberlain are joining forces with people of color, the modern versions of Kilrain.

Our Gettysburg is November 6, 2018.

Clarification: I should note that I have encountered much racism in the north as well. My thought that I could escape it by going to college in Minnesota proved to be an illusion. To give a few examples, when I landed my first job (in Cambridge, Minnesota), I was told a racist joke on the first day. In my second job, my editor told me about how blacks smelled worse than whites. When I attended a Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) caucus in 1974, I heard Democrats advocating sterilization of welfare mothers in Chicago. The problem goes deeper than the south.