“TOMORROW is another day ...” declared the wilful Scarlet O’Hara, the mistress of Tara, in Gone With the Wind. But yesterday is the day that remains permanently seared into the memory of the defiant citizens of America’s Old South, as evidenced by the colossal bas-relief sculpture near the Georgian city of Atlanta, proudly displaying the equestrian images of three Confederate heroes of the Civil War, or the War of Secession, as the Southerners prefer to call it.
They are Jefferson Davis, President of the ill-fated Confederacy, Robert E. Lee, Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate armies and Lee’s brilliant subordinate, young General Thomas J. Jackson, who was accidentally killed by his own men at the moment of his great triumph over the Union forces at Chancellorsville, Va., and whose sobriquet — Stonewall — signifying unflinching courage in the face of a superior enemy, still throbs in the hearts of all Southerners.
For the next two generations, the vanquished citizens of the Confederate states assuaged their agonies by replaying on their minds’ screen the action-filled four years of the war, right from the first day (April 12, 1861) that sparked off the hostilities with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina (the first seceding state), through the heroic battles of Brandy Station, Bull Run (Manassas), Petersburg, Fredericksburg, Chantilly, Fort Wagner, Harpers Ferry, Chikamauga, Richmond, Spotsylvania, Williamsburg, Winchester, etc.
The Southern soldiers and officers proved to be daring and resourceful to the final day of infamy on April 9, 1865 when Robert Lee, the haughty Confederate commander and son of a revolutionary war hero, surrendered to the upstart Union General, Ulysses S. Grant, at Appomattox Court House, Va, thereby putting a humiliating end to the Secessionist campaign. Gone with the wind were the Southern aspirations for separate nationhood, since the wind of change had suddenly turned into an uprooting maelstrom.
In their impotent rage, the defeated people of the Deep South also recalled, with a bleeding heart, the massive destruction wrought in Atlanta, Savannah, Richmond and other southern towns by the victorious troops of General William T. Sherman, on his March to the Sea, and also by the retreating Confederate soldiers, determined to keep potential military assets out of the enemy hands. Many a southern woman, ‘Daughter of the Confederacy’, pining for her dead father, brother, son, husband or lover, cried out in anguish, “Brave Stonewall, why did you die? Why didn’t you live a bit longer? Victory was ours.”
It was actually a little lady who had started the whole show, irrevocably setting Lincoln and the other humanists on the path of war. Her name was Harriet Elizabeth Beecher (later Mrs Stowe). She wrote a novel which was first serialized in a magazine and then published in a book form, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It turned out to be such a heart-wrenching portrayal of the miseries of Black slaves and the cruelties of their White masters that it “shook the world”, making the Northerners feel guilty and eventually drawing a tribute from Lincoln himself who, referring to the Civil War, had only half-jokingly said, “the book of this little lady has caused this war.”
However, the wrathful Southerners, licking their wounds after the war, were in no mood to throw in the towel without avenging themselves. Feeling honour-bound to settle the score, they set out to do so in their own way.
As the first act of revenge, they took the life of their worst enemy, the Union President. Within a week of General Lee’s surrender and immediately after his re-election, President Lincoln was shot in a theatre by a fanatic, an obscure actor named John Wilkes Booth. In his second term, Lincoln would have devoted his energies to securing full citizenship (and voting) rights for the female half of the population.
The old Confederate soldiers’ next move was the setting up of a secret society, a terrorist organization named the Ku Klux Klan. This strange title was derived from a fanciful resemblance to the sound produced by the cocking of a Winchester rifle. The mission of its members, who grotesquely covered their faces with pillowcases, was to terrorize the vote-casting ex-slaves and eliminate White Nigger-lovers (Carpetbaggers from the North and the Southern Scalawags). KKK was suppressed within a few years, but was revived in 1915. It is still operational in an off and on manner, specially in Georgia.
Never ready to accept Niggers in their midst the racists even went to the extent of lynching (hanging) a Black man, if he became friendly with a White woman. However, in this version of honour killing, the woman was not murdered.
Segregation and Jim Crow’s policies were implemented in the whole land with a vengeance, to remind the liberated people that they were pariahs all the same — outcasts and untouchables — in White society. Worst of all, even the educational institutions, temples of learning and enlightenment, behaved in a shameful manner, declaring classrooms and libraries off-limits to Black knowledge seekers. The whole world was shocked when Governor Wallace of Alabama planted himself at the gate of a college to block the entry of a Black student.
It was only after the murder, in 1968, of Martin Luther King, Jr, civil rights activist and a Nobel laureate, that the racist horror subsided to a sensible extent. MLK, a target of White fury, who brought Lincoln’s (and his own) dream to its fruition, had prophetically said in his last address, even as James Earl Ray inserted slugs in his gun, “It really doesn’t matter with me now because I have been to the mountaintop.”
Would the Americans now summon up courage and wisdom enough to send MLK to Mount Rushmore as a national hero of America? This would certainly signal an apt and happy end of the smouldering Civil War. Abe Lincoln would welcome it, while Uncle Sam and Uncle Tom finally unite in a hearty embrace.
