Born Fighting

by James Webb

  To the amazement—and the continual consternation—of the outside forces that came south to reap the benefits of conquest and to “reconstruct” the basis of its society, during more than a decade of military occupation and radical political policies, very few whites in the region broke ranks. The warrior aristocracy whose roots were in the long-ago lowlands of Scotland was still in place in the South of the late 1800s. Indeed, the trampled South would surprise the nation with the number of soldiers it provided to the otherwise hated Yankee Blue when war broke out against Spain in 1898. The Scots-Irish culture was resilient, while for better or for worse its core values remained constant. It had hardened and adapted to the changes brought about by long journeys to Ireland, to the Appalachian Mountains, and to all the westward destinations where the informal family ties had melded into an interlocking network in what appeared to be a chaotic wilderness, until its mores had become the very backbone of the South. The Civil War had only strengthened these links of “Celtic kinship,” galvanizing them with remembered acts of courage and horrendous loss. If in 1861 a soldier had marched off to battle remembering the sacrifices of Londonderry, Valley Forge, King’s Mountain, New Orleans, and the Indian wars, by 1865 he and his extended family—a kinship that stretched throughout the region—knew that no army in modern history had fought harder and at such cost as his own. And in their view, during Reconstruction every piece of the fabric of their existence was still under attack.

  The North, under the umbrella of the Republican Party, did indeed come south to free the slaves and improve their lot. But many of its soldiers, government hacks, and businessmen also came for more sinister reasons; to celebrate their conquest, to exact revenge for the war, and to sink their capital assets deeply and permanently inside a devastated economy. David Hackett Fischer mentions that the Civil War “radically transformed northern attitudes toward southern folkways. As casualty lists grew longer northern aims changed from an intention merely to resist the expansion of southern culture to a determination to transform it. As this attitude spread through the northern states the Civil War became a cultural revolution. . . . Radical Reconstruction was an attempt to impose by force the cultures of New England and the midlands upon the coastal and highland south.”4

  And thus the goals of Reconstruction, involving far more than bringing new peace to a nation whose heart had been torn in two by war, became a matter of perspective. To the typical Scots-Irish Southerner, this attempt to impose the culture of New England was little different than the perpetual English invasions of Scotland or the Anglican attempts at political hegemony in Ulster. The Northern dominance of all manner of economic systems brought by Reconstruction laws and policies could not be stopped by the South’s defeated leaders, and in many cases was not even understood by the average Southern yeoman. But assaults on personal dignity and an attempt to change their way of life were, as always in this culture, a different thing.

  For the most well-intentioned advocates of eliminating slavery, Reconstruction involved grand ideals, and the cold reality that in the short term, true equality for former slaves could only be accomplished by the heavy hand of outside force. The clearest and most honest voice on their behalf came from former slave and noted abolitionist Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most famous African-American of the nineteenth century. In 1866, Douglass was calling for a Reconstructive effort “to bring under Federal authority States into which no loyal man from the North may safely enter, and to bring men into the national councils who . . . do not even conceal their deadly hate of the country that conquered them . . . Slavery . . . today is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South. . . . The people . . . want a reconstruction such as will protect loyal men, black and white, in their persons and property. . . . The plain, common-sense way of doing this work is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike.”5

  But even Abraham Lincoln himself had favored a gradual emancipation, with financial compensation given to former slave owners,6 while the Reconstruction government attempted to accomplish the new world they envisioned through immediate assimilation and outright confiscation. The result was a predictably fierce resistance, followed by failure and, ultimately, retribution. By the end of Reconstruction, Douglass was writing, “You say you have emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation? . . . When you turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.”7

  The backlash became inevitable because the pressure from the North was openly hateful, infuriating the whites, and yet at the same time temporary, abandoning the blacks as the Northern occupiers went home without ever having broken the will of those they had conquered. During their stay, the occupation and Reconstruction governments did exact a heavy price in the face of this resistance. These governments were more than military; they had attempted to take over every point of control inside Southern society, from the courts to the educational system to the economy itself. Again, Cash: “For ten years the courts of the South were in such hands that no loyal white man could hope to find justice in them as against any Negro or any white-creature of the Yankee policy. . . . The level of education fell tragically in these decades. Actual illiteracy increased among the millions. But what was worse was that the state universities ceased in effect to exist for loyal whites in the Thorough period and went for long years thereafter with empty halls and skeleton facilities. . . . If the leadership of the Old South in its palmiest days had too often been only half-educated, even by American standards, the leadership of the land in 1890 would be scarcely better instructed and scarcely less simple in outlook than that of the first generation to emerge from the frontier.”8

  And worse. Rights of citizenship were denied many former Confederates, including a provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which in one passage famously directed that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” while in its very next section it denied many former Confederates the right to vote or hold public office. Since they were labeled rebels and “insurrectionists,” Confederate veterans were not allowed federal benefits for their wartime service, reinforcing the concept of states’ rights as local governments did their best to assist the legions of men who had become disabled during the war. Tales are rife from this period of the Northern occupiers actively encouraging public ridicule of and personal attacks upon former Confederate soldiers by freed slaves. Predictably, such actions were met with brutal retaliatory attacks in the dead of night designed to intimidate both the hated Yankees and the African-American instruments of their revenge.

  Violence in defense of one’s honor had always been the moniker of this culture, and the region now exploded with it. At the eventual but then unknown price of a continuing inequality on the inside—among both whites and blacks—the hard people in the mountains and the backcountry again locked their elbows against the invaders, the occupiers, the political reeducators who this time around called themselves Radical Reconstructionists, the philosophical fairies, the carpetbagger businesspeople with their grand plans and special deals, the ridiculers and the laughers, the moralists, and especially the scalawags from their own midst who would genuflect to the altar of Yankee power in order to live in a better house and make an extra dollar. Most of those who came south eventually left, although they did so with their ownership of the Southern economy firmly in place so that their businesses could be controlled from outside the region, thereby sucking generations of profits out of the South and into their own communities. But those who had cooperated with them and the recently freed slaves who had benefited from their presence would reap the whirlwind
of their arrogance.

  This last phenomenon—revenge on the powerless—had no historical precedent among the Scots-Irish, no real basis in the now-ancient teachings of the Kirk, and the decades of retaliation against those of African descent would prove to be a monstrous mousetrap that cracked their own necks as well. With a combination of cynicism and romanticism, the Northern occupiers had freely used their treatment of the former slaves as a cudgel to again and again extract a form of retaliation against their Civil War enemies. And now the white people of the South, urged on and even directed by their leaders—claiming to be the spiritual descendants of the vaunted Great Captains whom their traditions had forever taught them to respect and obey—took their vengeance on the beneficiaries of Yankee power, the very symbols of their own humiliation.

  The motivating force behind this massive retribution was the rawest form of power mixed at the top with a bit of nostalgia. These were no longer the Great Captains of old, leading an ascendant culture out of the wilderness into the Promised Land. They had their dignity and their bearing, but many were at bottom reacting rather than leading, trying to re-create what they perceived to have been an idyllic antebellum existence that the war and outside intervention had destroyed—and to regain their financial status. Others were awash in an overwhelming confusion that the war and its aftermath had created, particularly when it came to defining the social and legal status of millions of former slaves who suddenly were looking into their eyes as equals. Instead of hope, inside the region the South’s leadership was now itself running on resentment and galvanizing the white yeomanry by uniting them against the Yankee on the outside and the black family down the road. Loyalty could be expected and even demanded because, at bottom, it was perceived that both of these groups somehow threatened all that had been fought for—the validity of the South.

  The near-mandatory hatred of those from the outside, either geographically or ethnically, would result in the stifling of all internal dissent as the postwar leadership unified the body politic to fight the Yankee in the only way the region could—through absolute political unity. There could be no such cohesion if the dirt-poor white farmer came up with a new idea that went against the grain of what his Democratic, quasi-military leaders had ordained. And there certainly would be no unity if the black man were once again bringing back the despised Republicans, even to positions of local power. And the small bone that they could throw to their increasingly more humble dirt-farmer followers was that, no matter how poor one became, when he went into town at least he could drink out of a “Whites Only” water fountain, use a “Whites Only” urinal, and when traveling could sit in a “Whites Only” railroad car.

  This is not to imply that racial animosities ran deep everywhere or that other approaches were not explored. On a personal level there was then, and there still remains today, an evolved compatibility between whites and blacks in the South that is purer and more honest than in any other region of the country, and this closeness grew most profoundly after slavery ended. As Wilbur Cash pointed out, over the generations in the South, “Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro—subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude.”9 And as I mentioned to a gathering of Confederate descendants in a speech at the Confederate War Memorial in 1990, “Americans of African ancestry are the people with whom our history in this country most closely intertwines, whose struggles in an odd but compelling way most resemble our own, and whose rights as full citizens we above all should celebrate and insist upon.”

  Although whites believed emphatically in racial separation, the true battle lines for most people during this era and also later were not personal so much as they were political and economic. My late father summed up this distinction rather neatly when I was a child: In the South they didn’t care how close the black folks got, so long as they didn’t get too rich or too powerful. In the North they never cared how rich or powerful blacks got, so long as they didn’t get too close. As the years following Reconstruction went by, jobs became even scarcer and farms smaller, subdivided among descendants as opportunities for growth and expansion bypassed the region. The thin veneer of white leadership in the South knew full well that as long as poor whites and poor blacks were blaming each other for their misery, the prospects were small that they would join together and address their mutual plight along class, rather than racial, lines.

  If evidence of this tendency were needed, one could find it in the way the South’s white leadership put down the Populist movement of the late 1800s. The movement, an outgrowth of a national agrarian revolt that had its origins in the Midwest, was based on the essentially Jacksonian principles that “society was to be judged not by its apex but by its base. The quality of life of the masses was the index by which to measure social improvement.”10 Its political basis was the belief, again Jacksonian in its undertones, that existing law in America had become class law, a disguise that allowed certain privileges to flow to a few dominant groups at the expense of the many. Although an acute agricultural crisis had kick-started the movement, it is not difficult to find ancient glimmers of the Scottish Kirk in the rhetoric and style of its leaders. The Scots-Irish migrations through Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley and into the Great Midwest had left their mark on governing bodies there. Their insistent, bottom-up style of democracy was well represented in the agrarian revolt of the Granger movement in the late 1870s, the Farmers’ Alliance of the 1880s, and finally the Populist Party itself. Not only that, but Jackson himself had planted the seeds of “radical democracy” in the North as well as the South, among his chosen political base of “farmers, mechanics and laborers” who rallied under his leadership.

  The aim of the Populists was to displace the Democratic Party as the principal national party in competition with the dominant Republicans. Had they succeeded in the South, they well may have done that. And had the leadership of the South been less concerned about preserving the hierarchical pattern of the old slave system and more attuned to the traditional Jacksonian principles of the Scots-Irish culture, the Populists would have made serious and perhaps permanent inroads into that region.

  The Populist platform was extreme for the times, although not in its entirety outlandish. Among other things it called for abolishing the national banks (an issue that echoed of Andrew Jackson), electing senators by direct vote (achieved after the party’s demise by the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913), a graduated income tax (largely achieved by the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, also in 1913), civil service reform (an issue that Theodore Roosevelt used to his political advantage), an eight-hour workday (modern America should hardly complain about this one), and government ownership of all forms of transportation and communication. Its principal goal was the full democratization of both the economy and the social classes in an effort to aid the advancement of the underprivileged and those who were submerged below the waterline of normal governmental interests.

  James Baird Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892, received more than a million votes and carried six western states. An Ohio-born Methodist who reflected the Scots-Irish migration pattern to the Ohio Valley and beyond, Weaver’s “Call to Action” during that campaign resonated with language that reflected the traditional Jacksonian hatred of government-sponsored plundering. “If the master builders of our civilization one hundred years ago had been told that at the end of a single century, American society would present such melancholy contrasts of wealth and poverty, of individual happiness and widespread infelicity as are to be found today throughout the Republic, the person making the unwelcome prediction would have been looked upon as a misanthropist and his loyalty to Democratic institutions would have been seriously called in question. But there is a vast difference between the generation which made the heroic struggle for Self-Government in colonial days, and the third generation which is now engaged in a mad rush for wealth.”11

  In the Sout
h, many Populist leaders proposed full political justice for blacks—not in retribution against other whites, as had been the case with many Yankees during the Reconstruction era, but as a matter of pure equity, advancing the notion that political and economic democracy were one and the same.12 While never advocating full social equality or racial integration, the Populist leaders in the South gere still uell ahead of the nation and their traditional regional leaders on the assue of race. Thomas Watson, a Populist elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia, dared to utter the unspeakable in 1892 when he wrkte, “Why should the colored man always be taught that the white man of his neighborhood hates him, while a Northern man, who taxes every rag on his back, loves him? . . . [T]he crushing burdens which now oppress both races of the South will cause each to make an effort to cast them off. They will see a similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy. They will recognize that each should help the other in the work of repealing bad laws and enacting good ones. They will become political allies, and neither can injure the other without weakening both.”13 After the failure of the Populist movement, Watson later recanted on many of these positions, possibly because he had changed his mind, but more likely because he may have had to survive in the world brought on by the backlash against the movement itself.

  The retaliation against those who had associated with this movement in the South was real and overwhelming. Rather than embracing a solution that might have provided a formula for rejuvenation, Democratic Party leaders obliterated the Populist movement with a determined assault. These latter-day hybrid aristocrats saw in the Populists not only a threat to the existing order, but also the possibility that the Democratic Party’s carefully constructed hegemony could quickly collapse. And in that fear was what Wilbur Cash called “the fateful lesson of Populism. To attempt to carry out a tangible program in their behalf would inevitably be to raise class conflict, and to raise class conflict would inevitably be to split the Democratic Party into irreconcilable factions. And that, again, would be to threaten the Proto-Dorian front and lay the way open to the return of the Negro in politics.”14