Growing up in northwestern Georgia near the some of the most notorious battles of the Civil War, I was taught from an early age to have pride in those that fought.
But as I got older, I couldn’t really see the significance of the Civil War. I mean, we can argue all we want to about states’ rights vs. slavery but it was really about slavery. It can get pretty freaking hot in the South especially after a rain storm makes it more sultry and humid. There was no such thing as central air conditioning. Even at night, it can get very, very hot and muggy.
So, those that had the means to do so would spend their summers up in the north. However, they were at an impasse because northern states had outlawed slavery. Southern states didn’t. So, if a plantation owner wants to bring his enslaved people with him, they were met with resistance. They wanted to bring their enslaved people and officials told them they couldn’t.
It’s very simple. You go to someone else’s home, you have to respect the way they do things or just not go. I remember in college at the Food Lion grocery store, an older man from Florida tried to buy beer on a Sunday. But Georgia law at the time prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sundays. It may have changed. But laws are laws. And you have to respect a state’s rights if the legislators have decided people shouldn’t sell alcoholic beverages on Sunday.
We live in a society or rules and order or else we have total anarchy and chaos. The problem is that people since the dawn of time have wanted to cherry-pick what rules to follow and what rules they think others should follow. And this was no different.
That’s not to say that people from the northern states were racists and didn’t own enslaved people at one point. I’m sure there are parts of Boston, New York City, Baltimore and Philadelphia where people are pro-MAGA and racists today. But the romance of he antebellum days has been a myth created by writers and filmmakers to portray the harsh realities in a better light.
There were no Southern Belles. There might have been debutantes many people lived simple lives. I think even in the book Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, this was all changed for the movie because even in 1939, Clark Gable can’t be associated with a racist terrorist organization. A lot of what we’ve heard and read about was falsehoods by the Daughters of the Confederacy and other organizations the same way Italian groups tried to make Christopher Columbus a brave, bold explorer.
A movie like Cold Mountain despite its problems shows just how brutal life could be. Young men, some barely kids, were forced to serve for the Confederate Army upon threat of execution for treason. And just like in that movie, Free State of Jones and Glory, people in the South who had no say or clout in political power had to deal with looters from both the Union Army and the Confederacy. Some of the facts coming out of those antebellum days was how some white people ate black enslaved people. You see they didn’t see them as people but commodities.
Maybe the harsh realities was the Confederacy was fighting an upward hill. It was bound to fall apart after a few years. It’s hard to get people to believe that it’s glorious to fight for a cause that doesn’t benefit them. Gangs of New York ends with the city being almost destroyed in the Draft Riots. Earlier in the movie, they’re tricking Irish immigrants into enlisting. But it was the propaganda that led them to keep believing the bullshit the powers that be were peddling. Even in the 21st Century, people refer to those from the north as “Yankees.”
But they can’t help it. It’s been ingrained in there minds longer. It’s harder not to believe what you’ve been told over and over again for decades. The Nottoway Plantation in Iberville Parrish, Louisiana has mostly burned down over the past week. Firefighters reported the main building is a total loss. A fire reportedly started on the second floor that set off the rest of the building. It’s still under investigation.
Reaction to this has been mostly mixed. Like most structures from by-gone eras, they are usually turned into tourist attractions. Even people go to Alcatraz Island and Auschwitz, but I can’t see anything jovial about attending these events. When I went with my dad and stepmother to the Moving Wall in remembrance of Vietnam War casualties, there is a feeling of somberness that comes over you. The names on the wall were people. They had families and futures that were cut short. I hope people have the same feeling at Auschwitz.
But it’s hard to have weddings and receptions at a place that was built on the backs of enslaved people in 1859. It’s hard to have a great moment at a location where you know people were treated horribly. No matter how people sugarcoat it, John Hampden Randolph, who got his wealth from sugar canes reportedly owned about 155 black people. Regardless of how people might say Randolph “treated them well,” he owned people.
He didn’t free any of the people. In fact, he moved them to the neighboring Texas which was also a slave state for two years. He probably didn’t want them “Union boys” finding out he had enslaved people and stringing him up. After the Civil War, he hired some of the people now freed. However, laws were put in place so freed people were treated as slaves. White people refused to hire them or were pressured into not hiring freed black people so they could be arrested for vagrancy and forced to work.
There’s no way to romanticize this. I can’t understand why anyone would want to go here on a vacation, as the plantation was also used for travel lodging. There’s a saying, that if 10 people are in a room and one of them is a Nazi, then there are 10 Nazis in the room. Even if Randolph was “humane” in his treatment, he still got rich.
And if you used this venue for weddings, parties and anniversaries, you more or less spat in the face of human atrocities. I used to live and work near Andersonville, Ga., the site of one of the worst prisoner-of-war camps during the Civil War. But to see people turn out annually to these events all happily and giddy is horrifying. A lot of people died from the Civil War not from battle but the unsafe conditions of being wounded. Dysentery killed a lot of people.
So, where some kid is getting a face painting, another kid forced to serve was probably shitting out his internal organs just short of dying.
And it’s funny this happened when it did because they just held the Battle of Resaca re-enactments near where I grew up this past weekend. Like George Carlin, I wished they’d use live ammunition. But seeing these guys go all out with their uniforms and sleeping in tents, they have no right to complain about some geeky college kid who likes dressing up as Kylo Ren.
For those saying this fire is erasing history, they do seem okay with white-washing other parts of history. History isn’t always pretty. It’s written by the winners. And sometimes the winners weren’t the good guys. Can you imagine the outrage if people had weddings at Auschwitz, Manzanar or Wounded Knee? Why shouldn’t this be any different?
In Oklahoma now, Ryan Walters, the State Superintendent, wants classrooms to teach about how the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen from Donald Trump. Yes, he wants educators to teach students that Trump actually won the 2020 election despite many legal cases proving otherwise. At the same time, the Trump Administration is doing what it can to remove all references to non-white men who have served in the military or high government positions.
Just because real history doesn’t fit into the narrative that you think it should doesn’t mean it should be erased. Your ancestors may not have owned slaves but even if they attended a lynching or screamed at non-white students going into a school, they’re just as guilty. They may not have done worse things but just like the getaway driver, they still participated in the robbery.
The fire of Nottoway Plantation, whether intentional or accidental, is another black eye of American history that needs to heal. It seems every time we seem to be moving forward, someone has to pick at the scab and it gets worse. Thankfully, younger generations are focused too much on living in the past as their elders are. And yes some Gen Zers and Millennials may be MAGA racist, sexist bigots, you’re going to find them in all age ranges and demographics.
The good news is that people aren’t too sympathetic toward the rich people who died in the Titan Submersible nor are they really as excited about the Blue Origin space rocket trip because what they really represent is just another wide margin of wealth inequality. And we shouldn’t be celebrated that people are rich and wealthy while exploiting people who would never be able to ride in a submersible, space rocket or even spend an off-season weeknight at a mansion turned into a vacation spot.
Times are changing. People who spend too much time living in the past never want to live in the present.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 