I Thought the Civil War was Over

Here's an interesting and disturbing thought: apparently for a sizeable number of people in the U.S. south, the Civil War is not over, it's just in remission. Now, I spent some years growing up in Tennessee and I'm familiar with the phrase "The South will rise again," but I didn't think anyone took that seriously. More than that, I've always had the impression that Southerners are among the more patriotic folks in this country.

According to this book I just read, Confederates in the Attic, there's a lot more below the surface south of the Mason-Dixon Line than most of us think. This book by Tony Horwitz, subtitled "Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War," is largely about the reenactors who dress up as Union and Confederate troops and stack reenactments of Civil War battles. However, as the author researched his subject he found a lot more than he bargained for. Here's the passage from the book that I find most chilling:

After the quiz, I went with the Curtises and a couple named the Crowders to a Southern-style restaurant chain called Morrison's. We loaded our trays with un-Confederate heaps of cornbread, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and collard greens. I was about to shovel in the first bite when Violet Crowder loudly cleared her throat. Then she turned to her four-year-old son, Warren. "Lord," he intoned, "we thank thee for this meal and especially for the great and wonderful Confederacy."

. . . (skipping a couple paragraphs)

Her son sat quietly completing a connect-the-dot picture of the rebel flag and filling in a coloring-book map of America: gray for the Confederacy, blue for Union, green for border states. "Warren," his mother said, "tell this nice man from Virginia, is there anything you hate more than Yankees?"

"No sir! Nothing!" he shouted.

All right, these are people in the 1990s (the book was published in 1998) who are raising their son to worship an entity that ceased to exist 130 years before, and to hate his fellow countrymen. These people are members of a group called the Children of the Confederacy and which, says the author, "was designed to prep youngsters for Confederate citizenship in rather the way that Future Farmers of America readied teenagers for agricultural life." The group has a 16-page "Catechism" with gems such as this:

Q. What was the feeling of the slaves towards their masters?
A. They were faithful and devoted and were always ready and willing to serve them.

Are you getting queasy yet?

Maybe it's because I live in Colorado, where racial harmony is very much the norm, but I really had no idea that racism is still so prevalent in other parts of the country. Horwitz goes into that quite a bit, telling about his discussions with Blacks, Whites, red-necks, liberals, and everyone else. The picture he paints is not pretty. The one bright hope he touches on is that for the younger generations the issue of racism is receding. Perhaps in the last 10 years it has receded even further.

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination for president it will be interesting to see just which states he takes in the election. If he wins in the South I'll feel a lot more optimistic than I did when I finished reading this book.