A Southern View of History

Last week marked the 150^th anniversary of the surrender that effectively ended the Civil War, and today marks the anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. In honor of these milestones, (what do you call a centennial-and-a-half?) I want to share a little bit of what I learned about this history as a child. When I was born, it had been only 91 years since the end of the war.

In my little corner of the Southern world:

We still hated Sherman, but not Grant, who had been just doing his job.

General Robert E. Lee was an honored name, but Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was just the answer to a trivia question.

And, the great, wise Abraham Lincoln was our former President too, although we knew that our ancestors who lived during the Civil War probably didn’t care for him much. Like Grant, he had just been doing what he had to do. He freed the slaves and slavery was wrong. Sometime after the Civil War, (years later, I figured,) a crazy actor named John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln while he watched a play. We don’t know why Booth did it. He was crazy, I guess. I might have heard that he had been a “Southern Sympathizer” during the war, but if he was, it was irrelevant, as was the fact that he shouted something in Latin about tyrants. He was crazy, that’s all. My little corner of the South did not claim Booth nor any of his conspirators. Wait! There were conspirators? I might have heard something about conspirators, but I thought that he just scraped some other crazy people up off the street.

I did not learn, until I watched the Ken Burns program as an adult, that the Southern states seceded as soon as Lincoln was elected President, and that Lincoln was killed less than a week after Lee surrendered. In fact, the war was not over yet when Lincoln was assassinated, but I didn’t learn that until just this year. Although Lee had surrendered his troops, other troops were still fighting. In fact, the largest Confederate surrender occurred after the assassination when General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered all Confederate troops in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, a total of almost 90,000 soldiers, to General Sherman.

I did not know that Booth was a very famous actor at the time, and that he had reasons connected to the war for what he did. Nor did I know that he had serious co-conspirators, and a plan to kill other U.S. Government officials at the same time. I did not know that one of his co-conspirators, Lewis Powell, was a former Confederate soldier from a Florida infantry unit, and that he lived in Live Oak, Florida, very near my Florida ancestors. I did not know that Powell had been a member of a Confederate guerilla unit and a member of the Confederate Secret Service. Of course, I didn’t know that the Confederate Secret Service even existed.

Even today, it is hard to know what the truth is, but it is certainly different from what I learned. Most of the conspirators, including Booth, were not from Confederate states. But to call them “sympathizers” seems to be an understatement. Booth, a slave holder, was from the border state of Maryland, a slave state that did not join the Confederacy. Powell was clearly a Southerner, originally from Alabama, but most of the others were from Maryland or Washington, and one was from Pennsylvania. As a group, they do not have a solid Confederate pedigree, but in their mind, at least, they were fighting for the Confederate cause. Except for Booth, they failed in executing their plans, but they were not crazy.

It seems that nobody held the Confederacy responsible for Lincoln’s death and so the stage was set for the South to distance itself. There have been recent articles written stating that Jefferson Davis officially authorized the Confederate Secret Service, and may have known about the conspiracy in some form. The conspiracy’s original intent was to kidnap the President, but it somehow morphed into an assassination. We don’t know what Davis knew, but it really doesn’t matter because the South has distanced itself from him too.

Welcome!

I doubt if anyone is going to just land here right away, but if you happened to just land here, Welcome to my new website!

I am in the process of migrating my old “Confessions” blog, at southernwhitewoman.blogspot.com here. Why? First of all, I just like WordPress a lot better than Blogspot. I find it easier and more pleasant to use, and it is prettier. I hate the Blogspot orange! Second, I got the idea to move my blog when Google started connecting all its services under one email address. Actually, it was Google plus that did it. To make a long, unimportant story short, I didn’t want this blog associated with my professional email address, which was my first Google account. But it doesn’t seem that I can just change it. Unless I’m missing something, the email address sort of defines the blog. To change it, I would have to create another blogspot account. In the mean time, I had discovered WordPress.

So here I am, setting up shop over here at WordPress, and thoroughly enjoying it. I’m changing the format from a simple blog, to a full website where the stories will have their own page, separate from the other content. I wanted to showcase the stories right from the start, but I have found that I have a lot to say about racism. Here, I can say it all, and everything will have its place, and it will be easier for a reader to find all of the stories than it was in the traditional blog format where the most recent entry gets all of the attention.

So stay tuned while I get moved in, and hopefully, this will become one exciting and dynamic site.