Ron Franklin
This blog is Civil War BSC: Perspectives of a Black, Southern, Christian. That background gives me a perspective that is, I believe, underrepresented in the Civil War community. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing the Civil War through my eyes.
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This is the second part of Dora Miller’s Civil War diary entry for January 28, 1861. Here’s the first entry for this date.
On this Monday Dora took note in her diary of a significant event that had taken place in church the day before. The state of Louisiana had passed an ordinance of secession from the Union on the preceding Saturday, and that change was immediately reflected in the services of the churches of New Orleans.
The church that Dora and her family attended was Trinity Episcopal. Dora noted that many people who were not Episcopalians had begun attending because the preaching there, constrained by a fixed liturgy, was less political than at some of the other churches in the city. But this Sunday was different.
Normally the service included a prayer for the President and Congress of the United States. But not on this Sunday when secession had just been enacted. Continue reading
When Dora Miller published her Civil War diary in the 1880s, she changed or obscured the names of the people she talked about, since many of them were still alive at the time.
One of those people was a young man she calls “Rob” in the diary. Rob was an enthusiastic secessionist, and was almost violently impatient with Dora’s allegiance to the Union. Continue reading
At the beginning of 1861, Dora Miller was a young girl living in New Orleans among her family and friends. But Dora felt very much alone. Everyone in New Orleans seemed wild with enthusiasm for having Louisiana secede from the Union and join the new Southern Confederacy. But Dora Miller was committed to maintaining the Union.
Unable to share her anti-secession feelings with her friends and family, Dora confided them to her diary. Her entry for January 26, 1861 records the coming of the long-dreaded day – Louisiana’s secession from the Union had become an established fact. Continue reading
In December of 1860 young anti-secessionist Dora Miller was almost alone among her New Orleans friends and family in her support for the Union. She had already decided to confide her patriotic thoughts to her diary because, as she said, “I can not, or dare not, speak out.”
As Louisiana reeled toward secession and the civil war it would bring on, Dora Miller felt herself to be under intense pressure to conform to the rabidly pro-secessionist enthusiasm almost every white person in the South seemed to be in the grip of. Continue reading
I’ve been reading the diary of a young woman who lived in the South during the Civil War. One of the things that makes this diary so interesting is that its author was a staunchly pro-Union young lady living among rabidly pro-Confederate friends and neighbors.
The diary was first published under the title War Diary of a Union Woman in the South. It was serialized in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine from May to October of 1889. The author insisted that it be published anonymously because at that time, many of the people mentioned in it were still alive. But now historians have identified the diarist.
She was Dorothy Richards Miller, an American of English descent. Continue reading
The First Battle of Bull Run, lithograph by Kurz & Allison
Abraham Lincoln insisted on fighting a battle the army’s own commander said it was not ready to fight.
As I began studying the Civil War, I often wondered why President Abraham Lincoln ordered Union troops to fight the disastrous first Battle of Bull Run although he knew they weren’t ready.
In June of 1861, Lincoln wanted an immediate attack on the Confederates in northern Virginia. But the commander of the Army of Potomac, Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, strenuously protested that his forces weren’t yet prepared for combat. Although McDowell pleaded for more time to train his raw recruits, Lincoln insisted, saying, “You are green, it is true; but they are green, also; you are green alike.”
The result was a fiasco for the Union and for Lincoln. Continue reading
A Georgia chain gang in 1941
The Wikipedia article on chain gangs* claims they began in the U. S. just after the Civil War. But that’s not the case. The chain gang was in use to punish convicts and reap the rewards of their labor long before the war began. And, again contrary to what the Wikipedia article implies, chain gangs were not just a Southern institution. They were employed both in the North and as far west as California. Continue reading
In 1897 writer Wallace Putnam Reed (author of History of Atlanta, Georgia) published an article in the Atlanta Journal sharing his memories of the Christmas of 1863. That was the last Christmas before a particularly unwelcome visitor by the name of William Tecumseh Sherman, along with about 100,000 rowdy friends, came to town. 1863 would mark the last care-free holiday season in Atlanta for decades to come. Continue reading
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee stirred up a firestorm recently with his claim that the deal President Obama negotiated with Iran to prevent that country from obtaining nuclear weapons “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Most who weighed in, including fellow opponents of the deal, protested that Huckabee crossed a line in his criticism of the president.
I certainly agree that Huckabee, in an apparent desperate attempt to snatch some media attention away from fellow candidate Donald Trump, went way over the top in his charge. But as a student of the Civil War, I’m not shocked. Accusing the president of wicked intentions and malevolent actions is nothing new.
Look, for example, at some of the comments the Richmond Dispatch republished from Northern newspapers under the headline “Spirit of the Northern Press” in its issue of March 13, 1863:
The Detroit Free Press exclaimed that President Lincoln was worse than Napoleon or the Russian Czar in his attempt to “crush and exterminate ten millions of people, armed and united in the cause, which they esteem that of their liberty, their homes, and their honor.”
Abraham Lincoln as a demon signing the Emancipation Proclamation (Library of Congress)
The editor of the Free Press apparently had no compunction about declaring Abraham Lincoln a mass murderer bent on “exterminating” millions of Southern patriots. The name Hitler hadn’t yet appeared in history, but if it had, it’s very probable the Free Press would have had little hesitation in declaring Lincoln the reincarnation of der Fuhrer.
Then there was the Fort Warren (Indiana) Sentinel, which was sure of “the determination of Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck, to prevent Gen. McClellan or any of his friends – or, in fact, any Democratic General who designs carrying on the war for the salvation of the Union rather than to build up the Abolition party – from successfully carrying on a campaign.”
So, in the eyes (and columns) of the Sentinel, Lincoln and his Washington clique were deliberately and actively thwarting the efforts of faithful and brilliant generals like McClellan, because they didn’t want a Democrat to succeed in winning the war.
If Mike Huckabee wants to defend himself against those who complain that his statements about President Obama are outrageous, he can claim ample precedent by pointing back to how that other Illinois politician who served as commander-in-chief in time of war was characterized by his political enemies.
Ron Franklin
© 2015 Ronald E. Franklin
As the Confederate flag is being taken down from places of honor in public places around the country, there are still many people who protest that such actions are unwarranted and hurtful. They insist that the flag they love is not an emblem of hatred, but of Southern heritage, and they feel that the enforced lowering of the Confederate battle flag from publicly owned spaces manifests disrespect for that heritage.
But whose heritage should be respected when it comes to how the Confederate flag is viewed? For example, I was born and raised in the South. Should my heritage be taken into account in determining what the Confederate flag represents?
I recently commented on an article about the flag by a Southerner who is in agreement with it coming down from public grounds, but who wondered why it couldn’t represent all that’s good in Southern history rather than the oppression, racism, and violence that many others, including most African Americans, see in it. Here is what I said:
I understand your desire to honor your Southern heritage. I too was born and raised in the South (Tennessee).
The heritage the Confederate flag represents to me is the childhood memory I have of cowering in the back seat of my mother’s car as we drove past a public square in my city where men dressed in white sheets and hoods had made a big fire out of something (I’m not sure whether it was a cross). It’s of not being allowed to go to the biggest and best amusement park in the area, and being consigned to a few see-saws and swings in Lincoln Park. It’s of never attending a non-segregated school until I went off to the University of Tennessee.
You think of the good things you remember about the South and ask, “Why can’t the flag represent that?” The answer is, it simply doesn’t. The Confederate battle flag has more than 150 years of very public history behind it, from the men who marched under it with Robert E. Lee in defense of a system every one of them knew was founded on human slavery, through becoming an official symbol in several Southern states of their unyielding resistance to equal rights for African Americans during the civil rights era, right up to its adoption by white supremacist hate groups today.
The “heritage” that flag represents is obviously very different for us two Southerners. But actually that fact is not relevant to the issue. What is relevant is that in the century and a half of its existence, the Confederate flag has been invested with a meaning that cannot be changed by what you or I think of it. It is what it is. And “what it is” is not something we need to take into the future with us.
Nobody is trying to take the Confederate flag away from those who identify with it. Because this is a free country, they have the right to keep it and display it on their property. But to fly it over publicly owned land, where all of us should be represented, is a kick in the face to those of us who have experienced the kind of “heritage” the history of that flag invests it with.
The next time you hear someone say the Confederate flag represents “heritage, not hate,” you might ask them whose heritage they’re talking about.
Ron Franklin
More on the Confederate flag:
Confederate Flag: Why “Heritage not Hate” Is Irrelevant
South Carolina takes down the Confederate flag, and turns a corner in its history
Photo credit: Bryan Maleszyk via flickr
