by Ty Seidule
Meet Robert E. Lee argued that “Lee knew slavery was wrong. He said it was bad for the slave and worse for the man who owned him.”14 To write in 1969 without comment that slavery was worse for the slavers than for the enslaved is a howler. The poor slave owners. Seriously? Yet that is what Lee wrote, and based on this one quotation, some people, including the author of Meet Robert E. Lee, argued that Lee was against slavery. I’ll go into the full argument on this subject in the last chapter, but the idea that someone who fought to create a slave republic would be against slavery is far-fetched. Yet my favorite childhood book furthered that myth.
When I read it now, Lee comes across as the great gentleman warrior of the old school. He fought an unwinnable war with competence and good manners. The reason for Lee and the South’s loss was clear as well. The United States had more men, matériel, and money. The South fought a desperate, unequal struggle against a more mightily provisioned opponent. The Confederates lost but kept their dignity intact, and leading the South was the most dignified human in history—Robert E. Lee. I read the book dozens of times. As a boy, I loved the conclusion:
He was a simple man. He loved his family and Virginia. He had a simple faith in God. And he always did what he thought was his duty. Robert E. Lee was the last great man of Old Virginia. In many ways he was closer to his hero, George Washington, than he was to the men of his own time.15
“The last great man of Old Virginia.” The book argues that the bygone era of the antebellum South was the greatest time in American history, a time when men were men. Heroes were heroes. And the two greatest heroes were Washington and Lee.
* * *
IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA in the early 1970s, we should have been focused on the civil rights movement, the 1968 riots in Washington. Yet I remember the echo of the Civil War centennial that ended in 1965. While the civil rights movement raged, the Civil War centennial highlighted the martial valor of those in blue and gray. President John F. Kennedy refused to attend a ceremony celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was too controversial for white southerners. Instead, everything I saw showed blue and gray as equal. Postage stamps with Grant and Lee looking equally dignified. North and South. Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. Union and Confederate. Both sides were equal, except everyone I knew saw the Confederates as more romantic, the underdogs, the heroes.16
I grew up with language about the Civil War that mirrored that parity. The names we give the war itself and those who fought it matter. Our shared understanding of the war comes from the language we use. For decades, as a child, an army officer, and a historian, I called the side wearing the dark blue, almost blue-black, uniform, the Union army. I refuse to use that terminology any longer. Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and more than two million soldiers didn’t fight in the Union army as though they belonged to an organization that fought only one war.17 An army relegated to the dustbin of history, as Karl Marx would say. No, the boys in blue fought in the U.S. Army for the United States of America. The names we use matter. By saying Union and Confederate, Blue and Gray, North and South, we lose the fundamental difference between the two sides. The United States fought against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion. At Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and a dozen other U.S. Army posts, the secessionists fired on U.S. property and then seized it.
The southern slaveholders were not fighting some foreign or lost-to-history army called the Union. The Confederacy fought the United States of America, the country I spent a career defending. I will call those men who fought to save their country and, by 1863, end the scourge of race-based slavery by their proper name—U.S. Army soldiers.
What we call the war matters, too. Most of us know the conflict fought between 1861 and 1865 as the Civil War, but depending on one’s view, the Civil War has other names. “The War of the Rebellion” was the official title given by the United States. Every historian of the war knows to look first at The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, a 127-volume collection of primary source materials relating to the war. Some northerners called the conflict the War for the Union, especially in the early days of fighting. That name recognized that the purpose of the war was to prevent secessionists from destroying the country because they were unwilling to accept the results of a democratic election.
The slaveholders initially called it the War for Southern Independence, but when the Confederacy failed, that term quickly went away. As a child, I heard “the Civil War” or “the War Between the States.” The latter phrase was rarely used during the war, but the losing Confederate politicians and generals adopted this term after the war. The United Confederate Veterans chose “the War Between the States” as the official name in 1898, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) started a multiyear campaign to promote the term.
My textbooks as a child in Virginia used “the War Between the States.” So too did the Georgia Civil War Centennial Commission and the current website for my second hometown, Monroe, Georgia. “The War Between the States” created the impression of two equal sides, two sovereign nations. Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s first and, thankfully, last president, wrote, “A sovereign cannot rebel … You might as well say that Germany rebelled against France, or that France rebelled against Germany.”18 Using the phrase “the War Between the States” erroneously gives the rebelling states constitutional claim to a righteous cause.
So, what should we call the deadliest war in U.S. history and the only war in which we count the casualties from both sides? “The Civil War” works for me; as an added bonus, the Confederate veterans hated it. The Reverend S. A. Steel, a Confederate veteran from Jackson, Tennessee, wrote in 1912, “The phrase ‘Civil War’ concedes all that the North ever claimed, makes us guilty of treason, and is untrue to the facts in the case.”19 I use “the Civil War.” Yet when I see an old monument with the phrase “the War of the Rebellion,” I smile. “The War of the Rebellion” is the most accurate description of the American Civil War. Frederick Douglass’s description has merit too: the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion.”20 When I hear “the War of Northern Aggression” or “the War Between the States,” I know a Confederate sympathizer or argument against equal rights will soon follow.
* * *
THE FIRST BOOK I remember, before even Meet Robert E. Lee, was Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus Stories, the book my father read to us at bedtime. My sister Nancy snuggled on his left side, and I was under his right arm. My little sister Amy, four and a half years younger than I, sat on his lap and turned the pages. Every night, one of us picked a story, and my dad transported us to a Georgia plantation to hear the tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear—in dialect.21
The Uncle Remus stories were the original American fables. Joel Chandler Harris, a white Georgia newspaperman, wrote the stories just after Reconstruction ended, based on the years he spent at Turnwold Plantation near Eatonton, Georgia, during the Civil War. Harris used the figure of Uncle Remus, an African American former slave, as the narrator for his stories and wrote in what we now call dialect.22
Harris published Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the Folklore of the Old Plantation in 1881, followed by seven other volumes of Uncle Remus fables, a total of 185 stories. The Uncle Remus stories became an international sensation. Mark Twain and Harris became charter members of the American Folklore Society, popularizing Black storytelling. Twain used Harris’s dialect as the model for the character of Jim in his greatest book, Huckleberry Finn.23
My dad, however, didn’t read us Joel Chandler Harris’s stories; he read Walt Disney’s interpretation. Harris’s Uncle Remus was a freedman. The story occurred after the Civil War. Disney’s character was a slave or maybe he wasn’t; it’s not clear. I thought he was an enslaved man when my dad read us those stories. Walt Disney described Remus in the foreword to the book as a “character so loveable, so filled with humor and u
nderstanding that he will live as long as literature itself.”24
Remus lived to help Johnny, the young white boy in Disney’s story. Here was the problem of the Disney version of Uncle Remus that my dad read to me every night for years. African Americans’ purpose was to serve white folks through amusement or through labor. That’s the message I received through night after night of Uncle Remus stories.
The book my father read to my sisters and me was originally published in 1947. Our edition was published in 1968, the eighteenth printing. Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus Stories continued its remarkable publishing run into the mid-1980s. Time magazine’s film critic Richard Schickel estimated that 800 million people around the world read a Disney book in 1968. Count me as one. The book wasn’t our only connection to Uncle Remus. My family had The Washington Post delivered every morning. I started reading newspapers to see Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus comic strip along with 150 million other people.25
The nightly reading of Uncle Remus led the Seidule family to Sunday night viewing of NBC’s Wonderful World of Disney. We were one of 100 million people who saw the Disney TV show a year. The program opened with the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Disney’s Song of the South, a live-action/animated musical film made in 1946. We sang the song on car trips. Even now, decades later, when I say the word “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” the melody and the lyrics invade my brain like a musical earworm.
The book my dad read to us every night, Disney’s Uncle Remus, was a companion to the movie Song of the South. After years of hearing the adventures of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, I couldn’t wait to go see the movie. Nothing could have prepared me better. The movie told the story of Johnny, whose parents bring him to his grandmother’s plantation. The father leaves the family to go back to Atlanta for work, and Johnny, upset and missing his dad, decides to run away. Uncle Remus finds the boy and through the stories of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox persuades him to return home. Yet when Uncle Remus brings the child back to the main plantation house, Johnny’s mother chides Remus for not bringing him home immediately. In the finale, Johnny races across an open field and a bull tramples him. Uncle Remus carries him back home, and through storytelling the boy makes a miraculous recovery.
The movie is a racist trope. White people with important white people issues solve their problems with the help of a kindly old Black man dressed in rags. Watching it recently, I found it unbearable. For me it’s so awful because I know how much I loved it as a child. It’s a genre of American writing known as plantation fiction, the moonlight and magnolias school, that makes the plantation a rural fantasy of the better, simpler life compared with the modern, impersonal age of technology.
In 1970, Disney announced that it would never show the movie again because of its racist tropes. Yet two years later, Disney said the title was its “most requested” and released it. In 1972, Song of the South became the most successful rerelease of a movie ever for Disney, more than Snow White, Fantasia, Pinocchio, or any of the great back catalog of Disney cartoons. Many children couldn’t wait to see Song of the South, because the TV show and the book had prepared us for years. When I was ten, Song of the South was the first movie I saw in a theater and I loved it.26
Luckily, Song of the South hasn’t infected more recent generations. The last showing of the film in theaters was in 1986, and Disney never released the movie on home video of any kind—not VHS, Betamax, DVD, Blu-ray, or streaming. I found my copy through a bootleg service. Scholars and devotees long for the release of the movie for different reasons—nostalgia, free speech, or mere curiosity. I think Disney is right to keep it locked in its vault. It’s embarrassing to the company and it’s embarrassing to me.
Today, the only remnant of Song of the South is a sanitized ride at Disney theme parks in California, Florida, and Japan. Created in the 1980s, Splash Mountain, a log flume ride, has its origins in the racist Song of the South movie.
* * *
SONG OF THE SOUTH is hardly the only book and movie I look back on and cringe. The first adult book I read was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Because the book clocked in at more than a thousand pages, reading Gone With the Wind felt like a great accomplishment to twelve-year-old me. Through Gone With the Wind, I experienced the escapist rush, the euphoria that comes with reading. Rhett and Scarlett, Ashley and Melanie, and the hundreds of characters that populate the more than 400,000-word book transfixed me. Gone With the Wind revealed to me that reading a book could be better than TV, even a thick paperback with nearly translucent paper and a tiny font. As soon as I finished it, I started again. I wasn’t the only one to read the book.
Thirty million copies of the book are in print today. A Harris poll conducted in 2008 and 2014 listed Gone With the Wind as America’s second-favorite book, besting the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series as well as To Kill a Mockingbird and Moby-Dick. Only the Bible rates higher. When it was published in 1936, Gone With the Wind spent two years atop the best-seller lists.27
If the book is a publishing landmark, the movie became a cinematic colossus. David O. Selznick’s 1939 opus, one of the first in Technicolor, remains the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation. In its first run, the film sold more than 200 million tickets, even though the U.S. population at the time was 130 million.28 Put another way, almost every white adult in the country went to the theater to view the movie. And there was a lot to see. The film clocks in just shy of four hours with a much-appreciated intermission. The demand was so strong in New York City that three first-run movie theaters, the Big Apple’s best houses—the Empire, Ritz, and Palace—all played Gone With the Wind for one year. Atlanta doubled the time to two straight years. Amazingly, London played the movie without interruption for four years.29
I saw Gone With the Wind for the first time in 1976 when the movie had its television premiere. NBC bought the rights for a then-staggering sum of $5 million for a single screening. The film’s TV debut became the highest-rated program ever aired by one network. Over two nights, 162 million people watched the movie.30 Like much of the nation, my family gathered around our twenty-inch color TV over two nights. Gone With the Wind was the first movie I saw after reading the book. When Scarlett walked through Atlanta among hundreds of wounded Confederate soldiers lying near the railroad station, I thought, this is what war really looks like. Here was the Civil War on a scale I could barely comprehend. The shot goes up and up, providing first a balcony view and then a bird’s-eye view of casualties upon casualties upon casualties.
I loved Gone With the Wind. So too did the nation, and it has influenced Americans’ view of the Civil War more than any history book. Nothing else has come close to the profound and lasting effect Margaret Mitchell’s book and David O. Selznick’s movie have had on Americans’ view of the Civil War, not even the war itself. The movie’s intergenerational success leads people back to the book again and again. As Gore Vidal once wrote, “In the end, he who screens the history, makes the history.”31 For many Americans, Gone With the Wind, then and now, is the Civil War.
Margaret Mitchell wrote only one book in her life, a work of fiction, true, but Mitchell said that she had heard all the stories before. She wrote a letter after publication explaining that “practically all the incidents in the book are true. Of course, they didn’t all happen to the same person and a few of them didn’t happen in Atlanta.”32
A Georgian born in 1900, Mitchell knew her family’s history of the Civil War only too well. Her maternal grandparents stayed in Atlanta as Sherman’s army descended on the town and remained throughout the long siege in the summer of 1864. Her grandmother’s house had served as a hospital first for the Confederates and then for the U.S. Army after the city fell. Confederate defensive entrenchments scarred the backyard as a physical reminder of the war’s loss. Her paternal grandparents lived twenty miles south of Atlanta in Jonesboro. As a child, she visited her elderly aunts Miss Mamie and Miss Sis, listening to stories of “the War.” During her time in Jo
nesboro, she also met several Confederate veterans. Mitchell’s worldview as an elite southern woman born in fin de siècle Atlanta was the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction.33
Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind with an eye for accuracy. She read the latest history, including primary sources, taking pride in her historical authenticity. Gone With the Wind “was as waterproof and airtight as ten years of study and a lifetime of listening to participants would make it.” After the book came out, she gave an interview to a paper declaring, “However lousy the book may be as far as style, subject, plot, characters, it’s as accurate historically as I can get it. I didn’t want to get caught out on anything that any Confederate Vet could nail me on, or any historian either.”34
As a child, I read Gone With the Wind for pleasure but believed it as history. As an adult, and for the first time in four decades, I reread the book. I only wanted to skim a few parts, count how many times Mitchell used slanderous terms about African Americans. The answer? She used “darky” 123 times, “nigger” 103 times, and “wench” 10 times. It was even worse than I thought.
I went to West Point’s library and checked out a copy. After one chapter, I couldn’t stop, but rather than continue to read the hardcover book, I bought the digital version. I didn’t want to carry a thousand-page cinder block on a trip. That’s what I told myself, but honestly I didn’t want people seeing me in the tight confines of an airplane reading Mitchell’s tome. The historian in me was embarrassed, but I finished the book in two days after two late, late nights. My goodness, what a story! Amazing characters and dozens of them. Mitchell’s galloping style of writing made me race through it. Yet, despite the wonderful plotting and pace, I was appalled. Mitchell included every trope, every lie of the Lost Cause myth.