Steve Bailey's Blog : Lost Cause Returns

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.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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