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The South and Southern History

by Clyde Wilson

PART 2

The War

For understanding the War of Southern Independence (still the most deadly and revolutionary event in American history) two works are indispensable: Charles Adams's instant classic, When in the Course of Human Events, and Ludwell H. Johnson's North over South. The best general history of the war that has ever been or ever will be written is by a Southerner, Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative (3 vols.), a true masterpiece that is just as sympathetic and profound in regard to the Northern side as the Southern.

There are said to be more books on the War than on any other subject except Christianity. We can only touch the surface of this vast material by pointing to a few worthy titles:

Rod Gragg, The Illustrated Confederate Reader

Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War

Robert Selph Henry, The Story of the Confederacy

Thomas di Lorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Forum Books/Random House, 2002), forthcoming.

Marshall DeRosa, ed. The Politics of Dissolution

Walter Sullivan, ed., The War the Women Lived

Bart R. Talbert, Maryland: The South's First Casualty

Felicity Allen, Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart

Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

Douglas Southall Freeman, R.E. Lee; and for the young, Stanley F. Horn, Boy's Book of Robert E. Lee*. Ignore the ludicrous biographies by Connelly and Noland. For Lee see also Richard Adams, Traveller and J. Steven Wilkins, The Call of Duty.

John S. Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command

Charles C. Minor, The Real Lincoln

William Gilmore Simms, The Sack and Destruction of Columbia, South Carolina (eyewitness account by the South's greatest writer at the time)

Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee

Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction

Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Ashore and Afloat

Robert S. Henry, "First with the Most" Forrest. The more recent Forrest biography by Jack W. Hurst is not bad, but avoid the PC version by Brian Wills.

John W. Thomason, Jeb Stuart

James I. Robertson, Stonewall Jackson

Raimondo Luraghi, History of the Confederate Navy

Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates

Kelly J. O'Grady, Clear the Confederate Way: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia

Charles K. Barrow, et al., Black Confederates

Arthur J.L. Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States

Much the best way to grasp the Southern spirit and experience in the war is through music and literature. One of the countless deceptions perpetrated by the notorious Ken Burns TV "documentary" on the war was the omission of most white Southern music – which is certainly as interesting as the Northern and black music that was used. Five volumes of "Songs of the C.S.A." recorded by Bobby Horton of Birmingham, Alabama, give a complete range of Confederate experience – patriotism, battle, loss, hardship, humor.

The South's novelists have been much greater than its historians. The Southern experience of the war is truly and movingly portrayed in such works as William Faulkner's The Unvanquished, Caroline Gordon's None Shall Look Back, Mary Johnston's The Long Roll, Madison Jones's Nashville: 1864; John W. Thomason's Lone Star Preacher, James Warner Bellah's The Valiant Virginians*, and many others. Don't forget the Confederate poets Henry Timrod and Father Abram J. Ryan as well as Donald Davidson's Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems. The recent films "Pharoah's Army" and "Ride With the Devil" are good in the same way, as is at least the early part of Clint Eastwood's "Outlaw Josey Wales."

"Reconstruction"

No period of Southern history has been covered by more distortions in recent times than has 1865-1876. Not too long ago, nearly everybody, including Northerners, regarded this period as a shameful unAmerican exercise in military rule and limitless corruption. Now, it is established academic "truth" that the only thing wrong with Reconstruction was that it was not ruthless enough. The South should have been subjected to a complete Marxist, egalitarian revolution.

It seems irrelevant to the current "experts" on Reconstruction that such would have required Northerners to have had ideas and purposes rather different from what they could imagine at the time, and that it would have required totalitarianism and mass executions, not to mention violation of the terms of surrender, none of which would have bothered Radical Republicans if they could have gotten away with it.

The books by Ludwell Johnson, Thomas Di Lorenzo, and Richard Taylor cited above are essential for Reconstruction. I suggest also the following:

E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction and Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky

John N. Edwards, Noted Guerillas, or the Warfare of the Border, definitive on the era of Jesse James.

Robert Selph Henry, The Story of Reconstruction

Stanley F. Horn, The Invisible Empire

John Chodes, "The Union League: Washington's Klan" (League of the South Paper)

Walter L. Fleming, Sequel of Appomattox

Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year

I prefer the above works to the often-cited Claude G. Bowers's The Tragic Era which is good on the evils of Reconstruction, but written from the viewpoint of Northerners who turned against it rather than Southerners who suffered through it.

For serious students there is Walter L. Fleming, A Documentary History of Reconstruction, assuming it has not yet been purged from libraries. While we are at it, there is still a lot to be learned from films such as "The Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind." The main thing wrong with "Birth" is too favorable a view of Lincoln. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Southerners like D.W. Griffith, the director, and Thomas Dixon, who wrote the novel that was used as a base, went out of their way to be good Americans and give some respect to the prevailing Northern sentiments. Besides, after Reconstruction, Lincoln and the war looked less bad.