Neo-Confederate is a term used by some academics and political activists to describe the views of various groups and individuals who have a positive belief system concerning the historical experience of the Confederate States of America, the Southern secession, and the Southern United States.
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Though outsiders often see neo-Confederacy as "rebellion", the Neo-Confederates themselves generally believe that the federal government of the United States has strayed from its original intent, and that the Confederate States of America was both the lawful and logical successor of the original government which formed out of the American Revolution.
The term "neo-Confederate" is considered by many people a pejorative political epithet and its application to specific groups and individuals has caused controversy. Not everyone, however, avoids the term. Al Benson, Jr., head of the former Southern Independence Party declares, "I am part of what Morris Dees calls the 'Neo-Confederate Movement'".[9]
Historian Daniel Feller notes that libertarian authors Thomas DiLorenzo, Charles Adams, and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have produced a "marriage of neo-Confederates and libertarianism." Despite an apparent disconnect (Feller asks, "How can a lover of liberty defend slavery?), Feller writes:
What unites the two, aside from their hostility to the liberal academic establishment, is their mutual loathing of big government. Adams, DiLorenzo, and Hummel view the Civil War through the prism of market economics. In their view its main consequence, and even its purpose, was to create a leviathan state that used its powers to suppress the most basic personal freedom, the right to choose. The Civil War thus marks a historic retreat for liberty, not an advance. Adams and DiLorenzo dismiss the slavery issue as a mere pretext for aggrandizing central power. All three authors see federal tyranny as the war's greatest legacy. And they all hate Abraham Lincoln.[10]
Hummel in turn, in a review of libertarian Thomas E. Woods, Jr's "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History", refers to the works by DiLorenzo and Adams as "amateurish neo-Confederate books". Of Woods, Hummel states that the two main neo-Confederate aspecs of Woods' work are his emphasis on a legal right of secession while ignoring the moral right to secession and his failure to acknowledge the importance of slavery in the Civil War. Hummel writes:
Woods writes 'that the slavery debate masked the real issue: the struggle over power and domination' (p. 48). Talk about a distinction without a difference. It is akin to stating that the demands of sugar lobbyists for protective quotas mask their real worry: political influence. Yes, slaveholders constituted a special interest that sought political power. Why? To protect slavery.[11]
Hummel also criticizes Woods' "neo-Confederate sympathies" in his chapter on Reconstruction. Most egregious was his "apologia for the Black Codes adopted by the southern states immediately after the Civil War." Part of the problem was Woods' reliance on an earlier neo-Confederate work, Robert Selph Henry's 1938 book "The Story of Reconstruction."[12]
The term "neo-Confederate" has an extensive history. James McPherson used the term "Neo-Confederate historical committees" in his description of the efforts from 1890 to 1930 to have history textbooks present a version of the Civil War in which McPherson writes included that secession wasn't rebellion, the Confederacy didn't fight for slavery, and the Confederate soldier was defeated by overwhelming numbers and resources.[13] Historian Nancy MacLean used the term "neo-Confederacy" in reference to right-wing groups that formed in the 1950s to oppose Supreme Court rulings demanding racial integration.[14] Former Southern Partisan editor and co-owner Richard Quinn used the term when he referred to Richard T. Hines, former Southern Partisan contributor and Reagan administration staffer as being "among the first neo-Confederates to resist efforts by the infidels to take down the Confederate flag."[15] It is possibly the earliest use of the term "neo-Confederate" in Southern Partisan.
This definition is not necessarily accepted by neo-Confederates, though Mel Bradford, who was a key figure in the neo-Confederate movement and frequent writer for Southern Partisan from its founding, was pleased to title one of his books The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political.
Another use of the term was used in 1954. In a book review, Leonard Levy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1968, wrote, "Similar blindness to the moral issue of slavery, plus a resentment against the rise of the Negro and modern industrialism, resulted in the Neo-Confederate interpretation of Phillips, Ramsdell and Owsley.".[16]
Some neo-Confederates reject the term "neo-Confederate." They feel that it is often employed as a pejorative description of people who take a sympathetic view of Southern history (particularly in connection with the American Civil War and slavery) and views on the Civil War that are not in line with mainstream historical perspectives. It is also used sometimes to criticize people who echo the Copperhead attacks against Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. There are historians that argue the current academic climate makes it impossible to discuss issues that view any part of traditional Southern culture or history as positive without incurring this label. Gary W Gallagher author of "the Confederate War" states it this way.
"Any historian who argues that the Confederate people demonstrated robust devotion to their slave-based republic, possessed feelings of national community, and sacrificed more than any other segment of white society in United States history runs the risk of being labeled a neo-Confederate. As a native of Los Angeles who grew up on a farm in southern Colorado, I can claim complete freedom from any pro-Confederate special pleading during my formative years. Moreover, not a single ancestor fought in the war, a fact I lamented as a boy reading books by Bruce Catton and Douglas Southall Freeman and wanting desperately to have some direct connection to the events that fascinated me. In reaching my conclusions, I have gone where the sources led me. My assertions and speculations certainly are open to challenge, but they emerged from an effort to understand the Confederate experience through the actions and words of the people who lived it.[17]
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a private organization headed by Morris Dees, reports on the "Neo-Confederate movement", almost always in a critical fashion. A special report by the SPLC's Mark Potok in their magazine, Intelligence Report, critically described a number of groups as "neo-Confederate" in 2000. "Lincoln Reconstructed," published in 2003 in the Intelligence Report, focuses on the resurgent demonization of Abraham Lincoln in the South. The article quotes the chaplain of the SCV as giving an invocation which recalled "the last real Christian civilization on Earth." The article further mentions that the LewRockwell.com website hosts a collection of anti-Lincoln articles, which led Marcus Epstein, founder of the Robert Taft Club, to compare the SPLC's tactics to McCarthyism.[18]"Whitewashing the Confederacy" was a review that alleged that the movie Gods and Generals presented a false, pro-Confederate view of history.[19] Myles Kantor of the conservative FrontPage Magazine described the review as a "web of falsehood."[20] Critics have accused Neo-Confederacy of being essentially a movement about race. Most prominently, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Council of Conservative Christians have had this charge leveled against them.[21]
The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to a literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional society of the Southern United States to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865.[22] Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of the Confederacy's leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies not through superior military skill, but by overwhelming force. They believe the commonly portrayed Civil War history to be a "false history". They also tended to condemn Reconstruction.
The SCV on its main website, still speaks of “ensuring that a true history of the 1861-1865 period is preserved” and claiming that “[t]he preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”[23]
James M. McPherson has written on the origins of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and states that “A principal motive of the UDC’s founding was to counter this ‘false history’ which taught Southern children ‘that their fathers were not only rebels but guilty of almost every crime enumerated in the Decalogue.”[24] Much of what the UDC termed as “false history” centered on the role of slavery with secession and the war. The chaplain of the United Confederate Veterans, forerunner of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, wrote in 1898 that history books as written could lead Southern children to “think that we fought for slavery” and would “fasten upon the South the stigma of slavery and that we fought for it ... the Southern soldier will go down in history dishonored.”[25] Referring to a 1932 call by the SCV to restore “the purity of our history”, McPherson notes that the “quest for purity remains vital today, as any historian working in the field can testify.”[26]
In the 1910s Mildred Rutherford, the historian general of the UDC, spearheaded the attack on schoolbooks that did not present the Lost Cause version of history. Rutherford assembled a “massive collection” which included “essay contests on the glory of the Ku Klux Klan and personal tributes to faithful slaves.”[27] Historian David Blight concluded, “All UDC members and leaders were not as virulently racist as Rutherford, but all, in the name of a reconciled nation, participated in an enterprise that deeply influenced the white supremacist vision of Civil war memory.”[28]
Historian Alan Nolan refers to the Lost Cause as “a rationalization, a cover-up”. After describing the devastation that were the consequences of the war for the South, Nolan states:
| “ | Leaders of such a catastrophe must account for themselves. Justification is necessary. Those who followed their leaders into the catastrophe required similar rationalization. Clement A. Evans, a Georgia veteran who at one time commanded the United Confederate Veterans organization, said this: "If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country."[29] | ” |
Nolan further states his opinion of the racial basis of Lost Cause mythology:
| “ | The Lost Cause version of the war is a caricature, possible, among other reasons, because of the false treatment of slavery and the black people. This false treatment struck at the core of the truth of the war, unhinging cause and effect, depriving the United States of any high purpose, and removing African Americans from their true role as the issue of the war and participants in the war, and characterizing them as historically irrelevant.[29] | ” |
Historian David Goldfield observes:
| “ | If history has defined the South, it has also trapped white southerners into sometimes defending the indefensible, holding onto views generally discredited in the rest of the civilized world and holding on the fiercer because of that. The extreme sensitivity of some southerners toward criticism of their past (or present) reflects not only their deep attachment to their perception of history but also their misgivings, a feeling that maybe they've fouled up somewhere and maybe the critics have something.[30] | ” |
When asked about purported "Neo-Confederate revisionism" and the people behind it, Arizona State University professor and Civil War historian Brooks D. Simpson said that:
Many neo-Confederates are openly critical of the Republican Party. Conservative columnist Alan Stang, in a Southern Mercury article, "Republican Party: Red From the Start", sees a communist conspiracy in the Republican party of the mid-19th century. He alleges that the 1848 revolutionaries in Europe were communists and that some of these revolutionaries came to America after the failed 1848 revolution to perpetrate some type of communist agenda in the United States. Stang states:
... Lee and Jackson did not fully comprehend what they were fighting. Had this really been a "Civil" War, rather than a secession, they would and could have easily seized Washington after Manassas and hanged our first Communist President and the other war criminals."
Another quote is:
So, again, the Republican Party did not "go wrong." It was rotten from the start. It has never been anything but red. The characterization of Republican states as "red states" is quite appropriate.[32]
Recently two prominent neo-Confederates Walter Donald Kennedy and Al Benson published the book "Red Republicans and Lincoln's Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War" in which they argue that Lincoln and the Republican Party were influenced by Marxism.