A year ago, I wrote a blog following my viewing of a re-enactment of Morgan’s Raid in Georgetown, Kentucky. The same group that performed that re-enactment is now planning a similar event in Cynthiana, Kentucky for the same time frame this year. They will be re-enacting the Battle of Cynthiana, in which John Hunt Morgan’s Kentucky Cavalry Brigade took part. If previous re-enactments in Georgetown are any indicator, they will not present history, but, rather, myth. The re-enactment in Georgetown was given a narration that extolled the virtues and valor of Confederate soldiers and politely suggested a passive racism that denied the true reason for the Civil War. I have sent e-mails to the listed addresses on the website for the Battle of Cynthiana. In these e-mails I asked if the re-enactments would depict truth and illustrate Morgan’s crushing defeat at Cynthiana and if they would present the revisionist deceit of the Civil War as a simple family dispute with no right or wrong at issue. I have received no reply.
The Battles of Cynthiana website can be accessed here:
http://www.geocities.com/morgansraid/
An accurate but brief description of the fight is on Wikipedia, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cynthiana
Having done some additional research in the intervening year, I have discovered that, leaving aside the falsehoods of Southern outrage and States’ Rights, the story of John Hunt Morgan and his Kentucky Cavalry Brigade is neither as honorable nor as courageous as its re-enactors would have one believe. The Kentucky Cavalry Brigade, like that commanded by that other false hero of Confederate cavalry, Nathan Bedford Forrest, focused its military power on civilians and tiny garrisons, choosing, whenever possible, to flee actual Union battle formations. While sabotage, espionage, and logistical interdiction of opposing forces are all valid military operations, rape, pillage, hostage-taking, and murder of civilian populations are not; yet these latter more accurately describe the actions of John Hunt Morgan and the Kentucky Cavalry Brigade during the Civil War.
Expecting the same sort of tripe masquerading as history from the re-enactment of the Battles of Cynthiana as occurred at the Morgan’s Raid on Georgetown, I again share the analysis that I wrote last year. If the committee for the re-enactment chooses to contact me, I will have more to share.
Southern Revisionism
Two weeks ago, this writer attended the Morgan’s Raid festival/reenactment in Georgetown. This event celebrates or commemorates the raid of Confederate cavalry forces on the Georgetown area. Morgan’s Raid, as the event is popularly known locally, brings many questions to this writer’s mind. Many Kentuckians today feel compelled to claim Southern heritage, although Kentucky was overwhelmingly in favor of the North during the Civil War. Kentucky was a major, well-used and publicly known path for the Underground Railway into Indiana and Ohio; Kentucky’s legislature voted to remain with the Union and declared neutrality to keep Confederate forces from using Kentucky as a staging area for harassment of the North. At the end of the reenactment behind the Cardome in Georgetown, one of the senior characters announces for the crowd that the Civil War had no winners, that all were losers and that neither side was right or wrong, that the War was simply the result of political disagreement.
All of this calls into question the general American perception of the Civil War, and the efforts of nearly a century-and-a-half of Confederate/Southern sympathizers to re-draft the War as something more noble and socially acceptable than it was. Why would a state that went with the winning side claim allegiance to the loser after the fact? Why would primary and secondary history lessons claim falsely that the true issue behind the Civil War was States’ Rights, when in fact the War was fought over only one “States’ Right”- slavery? Jesse Helms used this same “States’ Rights” false argument to fight the Civil Rights Act, knowing full well that his true allegiance was to entrenched racism. Why would people align themselves behind a heritage based upon an ancient wrong and resistance to its demise? Why have I never, despite living in regions generally of Southern alignment for twenty-six years, met the great-great-grandson or -daughter of a Confederate private or NCO- they’re all at least captains? Why do people without Southern descent claim preference for Southern ideals? The short answers are revisionism and racism. American public school history seeks to integrate all of the American people, especially the whites, in a way that fails to point out the many failures of that majority in ethics, morality and law. American history textbooks have been written to minimize the evil perpetrated by the South in its continuation of a morally bankrupt economic system and its political and military efforts to protect that system.
Although Kentucky voted to not secede, it declared itself neutral in the military disputation of the Confederate secession from the Union. The Confederacy invaded Kentucky in September 1861 for the purpose of securing strategic ground for attacks along the Ohio River and pillaging civilian stores, while recruiting what few secessionist supporters they could locate. In all, only about 30,000 Kentuckians fought for the South, the largest single component being found in the Kentucky Cavalry Brigade. Otherwise, Kentuckians overwhelmingly fought for the Union, with approximately 70,000 enlisting in arms to oppose the South. The Kentucky Cavalry Brigade’s modern writers make the boast that, “it was never captured or surrendered in combat, and only voluntarily turned itself in to Federal authorities after discharging its last assigned duty..,” http://www.morgansraid.com/hostunit.html What is left out of this statement is the unit’s regular failures; except in attacks against civilians, the Kentucky Cavalry Brigade lost 80% of the time. In its raid through Indiana and Ohio in 1863, the brigade suffered over 2,000 prisoners taken out of a force of 2,462. It seems to this writer that someone certainly surrendered or was captured, including John Hunt Morgan himself. Morgan shortly escaped and later re-constituted his brigade, but that does not negate the defeat, surrender, and capture of the unit, and its leader, denied by modern supporters. Those who re-write or re-phrase history to favor figures and events in defiance of the facts are often called revisionists.
James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America, has detailed much of the story of the re-writing of American history for the purpose of being more Southern white-friendly. I strongly recommend these books to anyone whose understanding of US history was developed in the American public education system. In casting the history of the American south in more favorable light, textbooks bring a “human” element to the struggles of the South and elicit sympathy for the Confederate cause. Unfortunately, this “sympathy” is indiscriminate and even argues the issue of slavery as a necessary evil of the economic conditions in the South. Many American history texts present the Southern cause as a political disagreement over certain intangible ideas, such as States’ Rights and minimize the truth, seeking instead to present the South as a victim of circumstance and necessity. The Civil War becomes a sorrowful family dispute over incompatible ideologies in the history taught to the American student, and its participants should all be honored as noble men engaged in a horrific war for mutually noble but disparate ideals. Comparatively, to this writer, it would be every bit as reasonable to honor the Nazi’s and their conflict with the rest of the world over incompatible ideals. To many who contemporarily support the ideals of Southern heritage, there is no irony in that last sentence.
The history behind this revision is complicated and even involves a late-Nineteenth Century through mid-Twentieth Century world-wide pseudo-scientific trend. The antebellum South possessed three primary socio-economic classes of people: The plantation owner/farmer, the merchants and artisans, and the poor white subsistence farmer/laborer. These classes were unified by a couple of facts; they were white, and, usually, they could vote. The Reconstruction introduced former slaves into this mix, creating economic turmoil and an identity crisis within the old structure. Once prosperous plantation owners were now faced with shrinking profit margins as they were required to pay for labor if they wanted to remain in the business of agriculture. Poor whites now had to compete with freed slaves for work, as did, to a lesser extent, merchants and artisans, as many former slaves had been trained in the various trades during their time as plantation property. Into this situation, federal agents set about enfranchising former slaves and people of color, giving them their own voice in government for the first time. At the end of the Civil War, many plantation areas in the Deep South were predominantly black, meaning that the vote of former slaves greatly outnumbered that of the resident whites.
During post-Reconstruction, when the South was released from federal control, many of these whites sought to regain the power that they had enjoyed during the antebellum period. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan had been agitating for freedom from the “carpetbaggers” –Northern federal agents sent to oversee the pacification and reconstruction of the South- and for separation of the races in public venues and affairs. Reconstruction ended as a result of power shifts at the federal level and increasing interest in overall US economic health, among other considerations. Distracting matters on other fronts and increasing power of Southern politicians in federal office shifted federal focus from an as yet un-reconstructed South. At about the same time, western science began to embrace a theory that supported European colonization of the rest of the world. This new theory, based in part on Darwin’s observations, posited that the races were the products of evolution and that certain “genetic” characteristics determined the state of a person’s evolution. Naturally, this pseudo-science being promulgated within European colonial powers, the Caucasian was determined to be the most evolved of the races. With this “scientific” evidence, it became easy to denigrate the black and advance the old prejudices and agendas of the defeated South. By the 1920’s it had become unfashionable to discuss the Civil war as being a result of the issue of slavery, as it was no longer fashionable, thanks to great efforts by the Daughters of the Confederacy and related groups, to think of blacks as fully human. Herein lies the shift in teaching the Civil War as a conflict over issues other than slavery. Thanks to the teaching of the pseudo-science of eugenics, which has now morphed into social-Darwinism, the true catalyst for the Civil War was relegated to abstraction while the new embrace of whiteness unified the majority of Americans to more closely reflect the values and ideals of the South. The influence of these ostensibly civic organizations continues today, although their prominence has fortunately waned under the light of progress in race relations since the adoption of the Civil Rights Act.
Still, the impact of this revisionism, which shaded the lines of truth in American history texts for nearly a century, continues in the attitudes of Americans, particularly white Americans, with regard to the Civil War and its results. Emancipation was not an unanticipated sideline result of the war- it was a pre-determined, if unannounced, outcome of Union victory. States’ Rights and self-determination were not the root causes of the Civil War, as the South based those arguments upon one issue alone: the continuation of slavery. The fact of this is observed quite clearly in the violence, criminality and hatred shown by the South towards people of color after its release from federal supervision under Reconstruction. Quite simply, racism is the root behind the Civil War and the revision of American history to cast the South in more favorable light. No right or wrong? This writer thinks otherwise. No winners or losers? What about those freed? All of them Americans? Americans believe in equality under the law. In truth, the Civil War was only the first fight over Southern racism; the South lost the second with the adoption of the Civil Rights Act.
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