He had federal troops coming into Norfolk. As we spoke, I looked down at the counter and reached for one of the flyers stacked there. Her face turned red and she thrust her hand down to flip the paper over, attempting to cover the rest of the leaflets. I looked at the flyer again, trying to read between her fingers. Paul C. Gramling Jr. It was May , and the event was just a few weeks away.
Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. We shook hands, and I made my way out the door. Before getting back in my car, I walked across the street, to another burial ground, this one much smaller. There are far fewer tombstones than at Blandford. There are no flags on the graves.
And there are no hourly tours for people to remember the dead. There is history, but also silence. After my visit to Blandford, I kept thinking about the way Martha had flipped over the Memorial Day flyer, the way her face had turned red. But my interest had been piqued. I wanted to find out what Martha was so ashamed of. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me. The entrance to the cemetery was marked by a large stone archway with the words our confederate heroes on it.
Maybe a couple hundred people were sitting in folding chairs around a large white gazebo. Children played tag among the trees; people hugged and slapped one another on the back. Dixie flags bloomed from the soil like milkweeds. There were baseball caps emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag, biker vests ornamented with the seals of seceding states, and lawn chairs bearing the letters UDC , for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. William and I stood in the back and watched. The event began with an honor guard—a dozen men dressed in Confederate regalia, carrying rifles with long bayonets.
Their uniforms were the color of smoke; their caps looked as if they had been bathed in ash. Everyone in the crowd stood up as they marched by. Look away! Dixie Land. I glanced around as everyone sang in tribute to a fallen ancestral home. A home never meant for me. Speakers came to the podium, each praising the soldiers buried under our feet.
More than a few people turned around in their seat and looked with puzzlement, and likely suspicion, at the Black man they had never seen before standing in the back of a Sons of Confederate Veterans crowd. A man to my right took out his phone and began recording me. The stares began to crawl over my skin. I had been taking notes; now I slowly closed my notebook and stuck it under my arm, doing my best to act unfazed. Without moving my head, I scanned the crowd again. The man in front of me had a gun in a holster.
A man in a tan suit and a straw boater approached the podium. His dark-blond hair fell to his shoulders, and a thick mustache and goatee covered his lips. I recognized him as Paul C. He began by sharing a story about the origins of Memorial Day. We should embrace our heritage as Americans, North and South, Black and white, rich and poor. Our American heritage is the one thing we have in common.
I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented.
Another speech was given. Another song was sung. Why the Confederacy Lost. To continue reading this article you will need to purchase access to the online archive. Popular articles. First, the political culture in the South made it difficult for the many people including those in leadership positions in the Confederacy who wanted a negotiated settlement to make their will felt.
Instead, Jefferson Davis, as president, was able to continue insisting on no peace short of independence. In a real two-party culture, Davis might have been pressured to compromise, or he might have been eased out, or the Congress might have been able to do something. The other part of the answer is that while the key Confederate commanders—Beauregard, Lee, Joe Johnston—were trying to maximize their military position so as to influence any kind of peace negotiations and give the North an incentive to allow the South to reenter the Union on somewhat its own terms, military mistakes in the late winter and early spring of scuttled the Confederate military position in Virginia and the Carolinas.
This precipitated a collapse sooner than might have happened, undermining any chance that the Confederate government might eventually pursue a negotiated settlement. Defeat was ultimately due to a loss of collective will. And so, in that sense, victory for the South was ultimately an impossibility.
Now certainly the course of the war, the military events, had a lot to do with the loss of will. We tend in Why the South Lost to imply that there was really still hope until March of , but really I think the outcome of the war became inevitable in November with the reelection of Lincoln and that utter determination to see the thing through, and, of course, the finding of U. Grant by Lincoln and company. Grant was certainly the man to provide the leadership that the North needed.
The South lost the Civil War because of a number of factors. First, it was inherently weaker in the various essentials to win a military victory than the North. While the slaves could be used to support the war effort through work on the plantations and in industries and as teamsters and pioneers with the army, they were not used as a combat arm in the war to any extent. So if the South were to win, it had to win a short war by striking swiftly—in modern parlance, by an offensive blitzkrieg strategy.
But the Confederates had established their military goals as fighting in defense of their homeland. In the period between the fourth week of June and the last days of September and early days of October, the South did reverse the tide, sweeping forward on a broad front from the tidewater of Virginia to the Plains Indian territory.
And abroad, the British were preparing to offer to mediate the conflict and, if the North refused, to recognize the Confederacy.
In , with the approach of the presidential election in the North, the Confederates had another opportunity to win the war. If the Confederate armies in Virginia, Georgia, and on the Gulf Coast could successfully resist the North and the war of attrition inaugurated by General Grant with its particularly high casualties in Virginia , there was a good probability, as recognized by President Lincoln himself in the summer, that his administration would go down to defeat in November.
But the success of Admiral David G. Early at Cedar Creek, Virginia on October 19 shattered this hope, and Lincoln was reelected by a landslide in the electoral vote. Judging from these responses, it seems clear that the South could have won the war. If it had more and better-equipped men, led by more capable generals and a wiser president.
If it had a more unified purpose and was more aggressive. The essays by McPherson, Jones, Gallagher, and Mitchell would all have been enhanced if the authors had focused on the basic questions: Who?
Could the constant defeats the Rebels suffered in the west have weakened their commitment to the Confederate cause more than did any contradiction between fighting for the freedom to keep slaves?
Slavery, as McPherson points out, did not weaken the American cause in the war for independence. The Confederate strategy of defending territory failed in the west, not in the east. Was it appropriate for the west? If not, why not? If so, why did it fail? Which Confederate generals commanding which armies in which battles lost the war? The answers to these questions—adumbrated by both McPherson and Gallagher—is that the war was lost by the Confederacy in the west.
The war in Virginia produced a stalemate. Fortunately, historians at long last are turning to the western theater, and we are now beginning to get the detailed studies that should facilitate our understanding of the war's most important armies, battles, campaigns, and generals Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.
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