By STEVE GILLESPIE / assistant editor
My dad tells the story of a particular visit to cousins in Mississippi as a kid back in the 1950s when he helped tear down some old tract houses built by one of our ancestors after the Civil War.
Andrew Jackson Gillespie built the houses. He served as auditor of the state of Mississippi during the Civil War.
When the first house was pushed over with a bulldozer, Confederate money went everywhere. Old A.J. Gillespie had put the state’s useless Confederate currency to good use and insulated the little houses with it.
As a small child I would literally sit on my maternal grandfather’s knee, just as he did as a child on the knee of his maternal grandfather in Mississippi, to listen to stories about the Civil War.
His grandfather fought for the South from the beginning of the war to the end. He was captured by Union troops and traded back again. He saw Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s wounding at Chancellorsville. He was among the troops Gen. Robert E. Lee took over after Jackson died and was there when Lee bid farewell to his soldiers after the surrender. When he died he still had the miniball in his shoulder that he’d acquired in the Battle of the Wilderness.
There were stories from the homefront, too, like the great-great-grandmother who begged Union soldiers taking everything of value from her place to leave the milk cow. So they did, after shooting it through the head.
Many ancestors on all sides of my family fought for the South in the Civil War. Some were slave owners; some weren’t. It was a sobering day when I learned it was no coincidence that some of the African-American kids I grew up with had the same last name as my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. My ancestors had owned theirs.
I share all this to keep from being mistaken for someone who “just doesn’t understand” the complexities of white Southern heritage. I get it, and I’ve heard the absurd rationalizations spewed by white Southern apologists all my life.
Things like:
• “The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery” — as if it was all just an unfortunate coincidence that Southern slave-holding states seceded after Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, the party with an anti-slavery platform, was elected president.
• “The South was just trying to exercise its rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to leave the Union” — although it’s hard to pin anyone down on what the Southern states were so unhappy about other than the possibility of slavery being abolished.
• “The Civil War should really be called the War of Northern Aggression” — even though South Carolina, the first state to leave the Union, fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. Then comes the conspiracy theorists who insist Lincoln purposely provoked the innocent South.
• And even those who insist it all wasn’t about slavery like to throw in statements like this: “Well, Lincoln didn’t really care one way or the other about slavery; he just used it to win the war, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant himself was a slave owner.” One of the earliest photographs of Lincoln has him holding an anti-slavery newspaper, and, yes, Grant did technically own a slave for a short amount of time after he married the daughter of a slave owner.
• And what about this one? “Blacks should just get over it and stop harping on the slave days.” That’s pretty hilarious coming from white people who celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, who feel it’s important to preserve a Confederate symbol on our state flag and who insist on celebrating Mississippi’s state holiday of Robert E. Lee’s birthday on the federal holiday commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.
I’ve written before in this newspaper that one Memorial Day is enough for me. I have no problem keeping my Confederate ancestors in mind during the last weekend of May when the United States recognizes Memorial Day.
I don’t believe in taking responsibility for something I have no control over, like the past. But honoring Confederates with a separate Memorial Day doesn’t merely honor our ancestors who fought and died for their country; it endorses their cause.
Maybe the Legislature, in its thoughtful concern for not leaving anyone out when it comes to holidays, will consider establishing an alternative holiday on the last Monday in April so that it is not only Confederate Memorial Day but U.S. Grant’s birthday, for those who aren’t so keen on the old Southern cause. Grant was born April 27, 1822.
Here’s what he wrote about the war, the South and its cause in his memoirs:
“I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written. Such history will do full credit to the courage, endurance and soldierly ability of the American citizen, no matter what section of the country he hailed from, or in what ranks he fought. The justice of the cause which in the end prevailed, will, I doubt not, come to be acknowledged by every citizen of the land, in time. For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.”
Steve Gillespie’s e-mail address is sgillespie@themeridianstar.com.
