The cartoon in question was one of a high school history
teacher in Florida teaching the truth about the Civil War and implying that she
would have to flee the state as soon as she finished the lesson since one of
her students was sure to rat her out. Of course, this is a reference to
Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis' irrational attacks on public education and
insistence on a white-washed history curriculum. The cartoon was printed in the
Lee Enterprise newspapers, including the “Roanoke Times” on February 18.
What struck me about this cartoon was the part where the
teacher mentioned the Alabama First., a cavalry unit of Alabamians who did not
accept secession and fought alongside General William T Sherman during this
infamous march to the sea. Silent Cavalry,
a recent book by Howell Raines, not only
describes this unit, but he does so in the context of examining how southern
historians deliberately covered up the history of the unionists in Alabama and
provided a false narrative that Alabama was solidly Confederate.
Raines, once the executive editor of the New York Times, is
a native of the hill country of Alabama, and his county, Winston, was a hotbed
of unionist dissent during the war. Silent Cavalry is the result of
years of historical and genealogical research motivated in part by his
experience growing up in a white southern family that did not venerate the
Confederate "heroes."
Like Raines' ancestors, many of the hill folks in Alabama
resisted induction into the Confederacy. Men from the Confederate governments
of Montgomery and Richmond harassed, imprisoned, and, in some cases, tortured
them. For this reason, the men of the First Alabama were happy to participate
in Sherman's destruction of southern territory. Raines suggests that Sherman
had to tell the First Alabama things he did not want them to burn; otherwise,
the cavalrymen would have destroyed everything in their sight, including
resources the General needed, since his army was living off the land without
proper supply lines.
It turns out that the disappearance of Doonesbury from the Gannett papers resulted from an earlier editorial decision to change the layout of the comics, and it had nothing to do with the content. However, the subtext in the cartoon, that the censorship of Lost Cause historians is returning in the form of Florida's education policy, is evident.