Last week, my wife Mary and I went on our traditional underachieving vacation, this time to Abingdon, Virginia in the southwestern corner of the state. Barely able to rouse ourselves for lunch by 4:30 in the afternoon, we found ourselves in a nightmare of Confederate commemoration when we finally did venture into town. The sign commemorating the Stonewall Jackson Female Academy wasn’t so bad, but then we entered Robert E. Lee Highway and were even obligated to turn onto Jeb Stuart Highway as we got closer to our winery destination.
JEB STUART HIGHWAY??? Why name a highway after the showboat cavalry general that screwed up much of Lee’s Gettysburg campaign?
What is it with Southerners, well . . . white Southerners, and the Confederacy? Most critics of displaying the Confederate flag and other forms of Confederate commemoration focus on racism. However, Confederate commemoration stands against almost everything identified with America. If America is about the worship of success, Confederate commemoration is about the celebration of failure. If America is about free enterprise, the Confederacy was an economic backwater that had relatively little in the way of manufacturing, railroads, and commerce. If America is a melting pot, Confederate states were unwelcoming to the waves of immigrants who arrived in the 1840’s and 1850’s.
When I ask people about Confederate commemorations, they sometimes mention local pride or their ancestors’ service in the Confederate army. But why should that make any difference? People generally forget ancestors who fought on the losing side of big American conflicts. Plenty of Americans had ancestors who were loyalists during the American Revolution, but there’s no highways commemorating the loyalist versions of Jeb Stuart. Likewise, I haven’t heard of any Mexican-Americans celebrating the forebears who fought for Santa Anna at the Alamo.
Why is that? Well, one dimension of historical commemoration is identifying personalities, values, and ways of life that provide models and inspiration for us as we orient ourselves toward the future. We don’t commemorate the Loyalists or Santa Anna’s army because nothing in these groups points to a future that we as a nation can embrace. The same is the case with the Confederacy which, as a massive rebellion in the name of a monstrous system of slavery, represents much of what is worst in American history, and deserves no commemoration. If we want to value Southern heritage, we should commemorate Southern abolitionists like the Grimke sisters, escaped slaves like Harriet Jacobs, and Virginia-born Union generals like the courageous John Buford. These men and women provide models of intelligence, daring, and public spiritedness from which we can all benefit, and, personally, I’d like to drive down Harriet Jacobs highway the next time I visit Abingdon, Virginia.
