Constructing my Civil War History

Heritage, Hate; Tomato, Tomato

I live, as our state license plates boast, in the Heart of Dixie. “Dixie” of course being the term of endearment for the Confederacy. The name probably comes from the Maxon-Dixon line, being the line that separated the slave and free states of the United States, and was also popularized by a song that became the “unofficial anthem” of the Confederacy.

Despite that, my knowledge of Confederate/Southern history, and the Civil War that was kind of the fulcrum of it all, is a work in progress. Before moving here, I really knew of a few very broad strokes. These past couple of months though, some of these broad strokes have gotten filled in, others have been added to the picture. There’s been two main reasons for this: 1) I’ve started some background research for a possible writing project and 2) one of the $1 paperbacks I picked up at the Friends of the Library used book sale happened to be about the Civil War and Reconstruction, and also just happened to be one of the most unhinged things I’ve ever read. Reading about the extent of the casualties, loss, and physical and economic destruction suffered by both sides of the war, and the social and political failures after the war, has given me a sobering point of reference — the U.S. in 2025 has felt like quite the race to the bottom, but there really is so much further it could go and has gone. I’m processing it all here in hopes that someone else may benefit from developing their knowledge of the era and its legacy (especially since most of us hope that this version of Civil War stays in the fictional realm, and grow concerned about the news from California).

Here’s some background that maybe most people already know: the American Civil War was extremely destructive and deadly. In its aftermath came a process known as Reconstruction, where federal troops occupied former Confederate states to enforce the end of slavery, the citizenship and enfranchisement of formerly enslaved African American men, and the political and economic requirements for re-union with the United States (in Mobile, there’s a section of town even still known as the Campground, which is where Black Mobilians lived under the protection of the federal army camp). The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed to abolish slavery (except as punishment for a crime), establish birthright citizenship, and remove racial criteria for voting rights. The Ku Klux Klan formed to use methods of terror and intimidation to blunt the effects of these Amendments and the other laws and policies enacted under Reconstruction. By 1877, Reconstruction formally fell apart with the complete removal of troops from the former Confederacy (the end of Reconstruction was dubbed by many in the South as “Redemption”).

One of the books I’ve read in my foray into this subject was specifically about the Reconstruction Era in the context of religion. In Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1867, Daniel Stowell shows how Christians - both black and white - in the North and the South interpreted the outcome of the Civil War in light of their faith, and what Reconstruction meant for their spiritual futures. From the perspective of most white Southerners (aside from the scalawags, a term for Southerners who sympathized with abolitionists and the Union), the meaning of the Confederacy’s loss was God’s way of chastening those he loves; for white northerners, it was God’s victory over injustice; for blacks across the U.S., it was God’s promised deliverance. Churches in the North and South had diverging goals for rebuilding after the war’s destruction: Northern Christians viewed the defeated South, and its recently emancipated Blacks, as a mission field. Denominational initiatives from Northern states took advantage of the federal occupation to establish churches and schools in the South. Southern white Christians viewed Northern religious and educational efforts as a form of cultural coercion that only compounded the political coercion of Reconstruction. Southern black Christians who had primarily been segregated into separate churches under white pastors began to form congregations under their own leadership, and even formed their own denominational structures.

The major denominations in the US - Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians - had split over the issue of slavery in the 1840s, and began to reconsider what reunion would mean in the new context of slavery’s abolition. Stowell provides lots of sources that support his claim that churches “debated in theological and ecclesiological terms the issues that divided northers and southerners in the realm of politics” (p. 147). While Christians in the North welcomed the possibility of denominational reunion, they also frequently stipulated that Southerners returning to the denomination must explicitly denounce and repent of the sins of secession and slavery. Northern denominations also expected that churches in the denomination would be open to both blacks and whites. Christians in the South, on the other hand, thought that reunion with Northern Christians would require them to dilute the Gospel with political agendas. One Southern pastor wrote that, “Fidelity to what seems our providential mission requires that we preserve our church in all its vigor and integrity, free from entangling alliances with those whose notions of philanthropy and politics and social economy are liable to give an every varying complexion to their theology” (p. 165). Another Southern commentator wrote even more explicitly that there is nothing for “the Southern people more sensitive,” and “to no danger are they more alive, than this of the amalgamation of the two races thrown so closely together and threatening the deterioration of both”. Northerners wouldn’t understand that, and their attempts to force certain racial policies and perspectives would be nothing more than politicizing the Gospel.

These divergent views kept the denominations divided — the Methodists finally reunited in 1939, the Baptists remain separate denominations to this day (though in 1995 Southern Baptist Convention formally repudiated its historic racial policies). Preserving their own denominations through Reconstruction was a way of preserving their own politics (which included racial segregation). As an even more critical journalist wrote in the early 1980s: “Southern traditions were united with biblical themes to produce a religion of the Lost Cause, a faith that practically equated the heritage of Dixie with Holy Scripture” (John B. Boles in Dixie Dateline: A Journalistic Portrait of the Contemporary South, p5).

Alongside this religious history, I read a historical fiction novel from 2006 that tried to account for the opposing perspectives in the wake of the Civil War, and that was, as I mentioned above, one of the most unhinged things I’ve ever read: The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee by Thomas Fleming.

I don’t actually know what I was expecting here, but it was wild. In this story Reconstruction is underway and Abraham Lincoln was recently assassinated. The radical Secretary of War decides that only by convicting the Confederate general Robert E. Lee of treason and hanging him for his crimes will the South understand the reality of their loss and the hopelessness of their cause. He sets up a military tribunal that meets in secret at Lee’s property in Arlington, and this courtroom context gives the author plenty of leeway for presenting longwinded and contrasting accounts and opinions. The novel’s narrator Jeremiah O’Brien is an Irish immigrant who escaped poverty only by becoming the apprentice of Charles A. Dana, the deputy Secretary of War who is also a newspaper mogul. O’Brien had been a reporter throughout the war and reached a conclusion that both sides had suffered incalculably and senselessly, and that therefore in the end no one was the winner or even to blame. Dana, however, is rabidly radical and O’Brien slowly realizes that Dana will stop at nothing to humiliate and demonize the South and crush them into both political and moral submission. Radical Senator Thaddeus Stevens was on the same wavelength as Dana, with outbursts in the novel like: “he sprang to his feet, trembling from head to foot. His chair clattered to the floor. ‘Never have I seen such incipient dereliction of duty!’ he roared [when he was asked to leave the court proceedings]. ‘If you acquit this murderer [Lee], I shall engrave all your names on the tablets of infamy if it’s the last thing I do!’” (p. 286). The former Confederates have their own fanatics as well, depicted in this novel mostly in female characters: the sexy Confederate spy Sophia Carroll and the “formidable” wife of Robert E. Lee, Mary Custis (‘HE’S LEAVING OUT THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE STORY! TO SPARE ME. BUT I WON’T BE SPARED. I WISH TO TESTIFY IN MY OWN DEFENSE AND IN HIS DEFENSE. I INSIST UPON IT! I WON’T BE DENIED!’ It was Mary Custis Lee. She was standing in the aisle, leaning on her cane, looking like the incarnation of one of the ancient Greek Furies” p. 341, all caps in original).

The novel presents the only one with any sense as the one facing a certain death sentence from a kangaroo court. Robert E. Lee, sometimes at his own risk, intervenes in arguments and talks fanatics off of a ledge. Sometimes he was presented as just downright saintly; one member of the prosecution even confessed “I’ve known the man for thirty years. A more honest, honorable human being has never walked the planet. Honor is the essence of the man” (p. 245). In his final statement, Lee declares:

“Do with me what you will. I stand before you, unrepentant, without apology, a rebel against a government that sought to drench the land of my birth in blood, to defile its women, to defame its men with rants about the curse of slavery. As if we didn’t know it was a curse! As if we didn’t hope and pray in God’s good time we could rid our land of it!

Gentlemen, this trial has made me sick of my country, sick of life itself. Perhaps the greatest favor you can do me is to find me guilty and consign me to a hangman’s noose. My honor - and the honor of those I love - will survive it. You can destroy a man but you cannot destroy what live sin his soul and in the souls of his family and friends!” (p. 396)

In the course of the trial, those with any shred of integrity gather that Lee did not commit treason (a lot of discussion about the timing of when he resigned from the US Army, when he accepted the command of the Army of Virginia, why he thought his home state of Virginia was in danger and how he was basically acting in self defense). In the end (spoiler alert!), Lee is found not guilty and Dana is exposed as having used the press to enflame the country into war. There are even some insinuations that he and the Radicals also orchestrated the assassination of Lincoln. The 600,000 dead, it seemed, were ultimately the fault of the newspapers and the radicals that wanted to make everything about race.

Maybe you’ve made it to the end of this blog post, and unfortunately I have no hot takes. I feel more trapped the more I start to learn how to piece it together. I’ll close though by highlighting a section from a different book I finished recently (and which is truly one of the best I have read in a long time): Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It takes place in Appalachia and it’s not at all a book about the Civil War (though the war is also a silent backdrop, as it takes place in Lee County and the idolized high school football team is the Generals), but there was a scene where the narrator, Damon, recalls confronting the gravity of different perspectives about the Confederacy. Damon is talking about his middle school language arts teacher Mr. Armstrong, who is a black transplant from Chicago. He played the banjo in a band, and “we’d not known of a guy like him playing the banjo. To be honest, we’d not known of a guy like him doing much at all, given there were maybe twenty Black people total in Lee County. He said guess what, the banjo was invented by his people, it’s similar to a thing their great-greats played in Africa.” Really this whole section where Damon talks about Mr. Armstrong is so poignant (and funny!), but this is the part I want to highlight:

“He was big on history, for not being the history teacher…Like with the rebel flags, you see those around, nobody gives it a lot of thought. One of the times we saw them for instance was outside waiting for our busses, where this Chevy D/K pickup on a lift-kit tractor tires comes roaring through the parking lot, tires screaming, bass thumping, shirtless high school guys hanging out the windows ripping loose a rebel yell. The truck tore a big U through the lot and back out to the highway, flapping its glory from two poles zip-tied to the bed: American, Confederate. A lot of guys around me laughed, some few didn’t. Some looked at Mr. Armstrong that was with us on bus duty, just standing over there in his button shirt, arms crossed, watching the whole yeehaw.

Then it got quiet. The ones getting on buses got in their buses. Everybody else found interesting shit to look at on the ground. Shoes, gravel, ABC gum. It was close to Halloween, I remember, because the pep squad had the front entrance all decorated up in pumpkins with bad faces drawn in Magic Marker. So that was something else to look at. Most if not all of us being aware that this flag thing was kind of an oh shit situation. And wanting it to blow over.

‘All right, let’s start with the obvious here,’ Mr. Armstrong said. So, not blowing over. ‘The Confederacy and the United States were opposing sides in a war.’

Still quiet…..

‘People,’ Mr. Armstrong finally kind of yelled, like he did whenever we were ignorant in class. ‘Are you following me here? A war. Opposite sides. Flying both those flags at once makes no sense. It’s like rooting for the Generals and the Abingdon Falcons in the same game.’

Whoah. We were all like, Crap. Because that’s unthinkable.

Some guys started mumbling heritage and nothing personal, and Mr. Armstrong took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking as usual somewhere between interested and flat-out flummoxed….”

He went on to explain how in the part of Virginia they lived, there were mountain militias who fought on the side of the Union because they didn’t want to risk their lives for plantation owners. But I just loved the way the narrator captures the contradiction, menace, and even awkwardness bundled up in ostentatious Confederate pride. And “Interested and flat-out flummoxed” really encapsulates where I’ve found myself living in the heart of Dixie.