The Lost Cause

The Confederacy lives on in the strangest of places.  Long before Nazis fled to Brazil, Confederates sought the Amazonian jungles as a sanctuary, replete with Confederate flag that flew for four short years in North America.  You really can't call it white supremacy anymore as the community has become so mixed race that Jefferson Davis would roll over in his grave.  But, they still take enormous pride in their Southern heritage.

It reminds me a bit of George Saunders CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, although he was making fun of the ongoing Civil War re-enactments you see every summer in the Southern states.  I remember when I was living in a dilapidated antebellum mansion on the outskirts of Charleston in the 1990s, I had to endure one of these re-enactments for three days.  The Historical Charleston Foundation had rented the old house and field to the local reenactment group.  I thought it was a joke but arriving back home late one night I found they took their activities very seriously, having posted guards at the entrance to the driveway.  They blocked my entry with muskets.  I told them I lived here but they still wouldn't move, so I revved my engine.  The two guys backed away and I drove in.  They followed me all the way up the driveway and were standing there stoned face when I got out of my truck.  I showed them my keys to the house and said back away.  They did so, but it was a bit unnerving.  You never know how these situations will turn out.

They were up bright and early the next morning.  It seemed to me they were purposely making a bunch of noise just to annoy me.  I was there as a guest of the Historical Charleston Foundation, recording the William Enston Home, a retirement village built in the late 19th century exclusively for white residents.  It was abandoned but the Charleston Housing Authority planned to revitalize it and make it available to everyone.  

I watched the activities from my bedroom window.  There were tents spread out all over the field and were busy preparing breakfast.  There were hundreds of these faux soldiers.  I decided it was probably best to go somewhere else for the day and let them have their fun and games.  When I came down, the guards  were much more friendly. We chatted a little.  No hard feelings.

For the most part these reenactments are harmless.  A way to bring the past to life and interpret it given the context of the time.  I saw one of the Black NPS rangers I knew from Fort Sumter.  He was reenacting a Union soldier.  The 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment had been an all-Black regiment led by Robert Gould Shaw that had fought a valiant battle at Fort Wagner, not far from Charleston.  The battle had been memorialized in the movie Glory.

However, you really have to wonder about a community that lingers on in Brazil seven generations later.  This is ominously like The Boys from Brazil, antebellum style.  Do they plan to resurrect the spirit of Jefferson Davis through his preserved zygotes?  Can definitely see a new movie coming out of this.  One with a steampunk feel to it.

While it is hard to take something like this too seriously, you do have to worry how persons hang onto the past, especially with the rise of white supremacy movements that place a lot of value in the short-lived Confederacy.  This wish to not just reenact but relive this era is deeply troublesome when you see it thrust onto the national stage as we witnessed in the January 6 insurrection.  Most states no longer allow the Confederate flag to be flown precisely because of these sentiments.  South  Carolina took down this flag at its state capitol back in 2015 following the shooting rampage of Dylann Roof at a Black AME church in Charleston.

The flag was never anything other than a war flag.  The actual Confederate States flag looked like this, a blatant rip off of the original US flag with 11 stars in a circle instead of 13. But, it is the "Stars and Bars" that lives on.  

My son badly wanted one when he was a pre-teen.  He was a big fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who placed the flag in the background at their concerts.  I mulled it over and finally decided to let him have it.  I told him what the flag meant, but he associated it only with the band.  Eventually, he came to learn about the feud between Skynyrd and Neil Young that led to the song Sweet Home Alabama.  He became quite a Neil Young fan in the process, preferring his style of guitar to that of Gary Rossington.  Weld soon became his favorite album. We had to hunt for a CD that included Arc-Weld.

Many musicians came to regret the songs they made extolling the antebellum past.  Tom Petty tried to distance himself from his album Southern Accents, as it had "problematic songs."  The songs no longer played well in a new era of fans who had been won over by Wildflowers.  The young generation was not as turned onto these rebellious songs as was an earlier generation.  Same goes for The Band's The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down, a haunting ballad that clearly shows empathy for the Old South, which is kind of odd given the band hailed from Canada.  At least, Petty was born in the South, and grew up with this embedded sense of heritage.

I say this just to show how much the Confederate flag has become embedded in our culture.  It is not something that can be simply confined to rednecks proudly waving the flag in the back of their pick-up trucks.

It has become known as The Lost Cause and lives on largely because it inspired so much wistful nostalgia.  I think David Blight wrote one of the better books on the subject in Race and Reunion, illustrating how a form of nostalgic reconciliation won out over the controversial Reconstruction between the North and the South, largely because the way the war had become memorialized in American culture.  Civil War battlefields became hallowed ground, particularly that at Gettysburg, where Lincoln issued his best known address after the North had repelled the Confederate forces of Robert E. Lee.  The battlefield is littered with monuments honoring both sides of the famous battle.

I remember trying to fly a kite at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island as the winds were better there.  I saw this park ranger come towards me with a steely resolve.  He stood before me like Chuck Norris and demanded a bring the kite down.  Why, I asked?  You know how many bodies lie beneath you, he angrily countered?  I didn't see how my kite disrespected them anymore than grilling hamburgers on the barbeque pit standing near me, but I took my kite down rather than continue this argument.

Ironically, Robert E. Lee didn't think the war should be memorialized.  He wanted to move on, but the war and subsequent Reconstruction had left such deep scars in the South that the Civil War became memorialized anyway.  Not only did the South lose the war but for a brief time they were forced to integrate Blacks into their society and government, like Alonzo J. Ransier, who briefly served as Lt. Governor of South Carolina from 1871-72.  The sense of white supremacy lived on and once Reconstruction ground to a halt in 1876, Southern states began a process known as Redemption that eventually led to the notorious Jim Crow laws that relegated Blacks to second class citizens throughout the South.  All though Malcolm X famously said, "as long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South."

I suppose that goes for Santa Barbara D'Oeste as well.  These local inhabitants with deep Southern roots continue to revive old Southern traditions in a pageantry they believe is as valid as any Italian festival.  They claim to have no political affiliation whatsoever but that is pretty hard to believe.  Not surprisingly, many Americans come down to take part in these festivals, helping to perpetuate The Lost Cause.