- William Faulkner
There is American exceptionalism - the belief that America is unique and unprecedented, that it cannot be classified or compared to any other country at any other moment in history. It is used to defend all manner of wonders and outrages. It is a watchword for conservatives, a favorite expression in speeches and manifestos, a kind of explicit faith. As some of us have known for a long time, America is not nearly as exceptional as others would like it to be. But the relative newness of America is an excuse for disingenuousness or naïveté. The Greeks may have invented democracy. The Vikings may have practiced it. The Swiss may have codified it. But America perfected it. For awhile anyway.
So, there is American exceptionalism, which affects one side of American life, the side that is found in the great hinterlands of the country, in places like Montana and Iowa and Texas. (Texans seem to have an exceptionalism peculiarly their own - but that is another matter.) But then there is a Southern exceptionalism, an exemption, an anomalous history, that is distinct, in addition to, the national exceptionalism. It is so exceptional that it declared its independence from the Union in 1861, provoking the Civil War, the costliest war in American history in lives lost than all our other wars combined.
In a real sense, for the Southerner, since 1865 nothing has happened. A shattered agronomist culture that was dependent on slavery was made to pay for its own defeat for decades. The South when I knew it in the 1960s and '70s was backward compared to the rest of the country. It is still the region of the country that is most economically depressed, where poverty levels are the highest in the country.
Last August, after the demonstrations in Charlottesville, I wrote about what sparked the violence - the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a public park.(1) Just a week or so ago, I got an email from someone I've known for most of my life. We don't agree about many things, but we've known each other too long for any of that to come between us. With her permission, I quote a paragraph from her email:
In 2017 all we have done is bully people. We bullied the president, bullied other people about misconduct, bullied people to get rid of statues, bullied people to change names of schools & streets. I don't care what anyone says it is bullying. But, no one sees it as that.
I must admit that I didn't see it as bullying. I saw it as another correction in a long line of corrections going back to 1866. It isn't at all a major correction, like the end of Jim Crow or indeed like the Emancipation Proclamation. It's mostly cosmetic - like the British royal family changing its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (which sounds too German) to Windsor in 1917 when Britain was in the depths of an all-out war with Germany.
History may indeed be written by the winners, but it is curious that no one seemed to mind that people erected memorials to the Southern dead until recently. How the South chose to remember its past didn't alter the fact that the Confederacy was a failure and that slavery was abolished for good. But the official version of events is now superseding all others. It's almost as if people only learned their own history in the past decade or so.
It should be pretty clear from her remarks that my correspondent is a Southerner. I, too, was born and raised in the South. But, strangely, I would not - could not - call myself a Southerner. Why? My father was from an old family in LaGrange, Georgia that likely owned slaves. I guessed as much when he repeated a family story to me of an old gentleman who had a rumored fortune in a locked chest in the attic. Upon the old man's death, the chest was cracked open and was found to contain millions in worthless Confederate cash. My father spent the last several years of his life trying to arrange to die in the South, which he accomplished at last in South Carolina in 1988. I think the reason why I don't consider myself a Southerner is because my mother - who was a much greater influence on me - was from Ohio, and had grown, over the course of her 42-year marriage to my father, to hate the South.
When he was awarded the National Book Award for his novel The Moviegoer in 1960, Walker Percy was asked why there were so many good Southern writers. "Because we got beat," he replied. Knowledge of defeat, of standing up and getting knocked down for values that are so scabrous to us today that it's impossible for us to comprehend how the standing up for them could have once been thought to be an incredibly romantic gesture, romantic precisely because they were so indefensible, informs the works of so many Southern writers. Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and James Agee are just a few of them.
By far the greatest Southern writer was the novelist William Faulkner. He seemed to carry the full burden of the South's fabled and sinful past, and he knew his subject well:
"For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods, and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet. . . ."
The South was not some foreign nation that was conquered. It was defeated in a civil war - an internal, internecine conflict that pitted family against family. Lincoln suppressed a poorly organized, dimly conceived but valiantly fought rebellion. It took as long as it did only because the Union army underestimated the Rebels' determination. What the hell were they fighting for? For what did almost three-quarters of a million Americans die? The Union fought to preserve itself. The Confederacy fought for the same thing. Was the war fought over slavery? If not, then what was it about? We haven't yet made up our minds. The issue of slavery came up in 1776 when the Constitution was being drafted, but the southern states, whose economies depended on it, forced the postponement of the ultimate resolution of the issue. "We have the wolf by the ear," Jefferson wrote in 1820, "and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go." They finally let it go, knowing full well what would happen next, forty-one years later.
If it means something to be a Southerner, as I believe it does, then a Southerner has to account in some way for his past - the same past that every American must account for, as America's Original Sin. But Southerners were the ones who "got beat." For them, the Civil War was not a great leap forward from what Lincoln called the "dogmas of the quiet past," but a demoralizing defeat. Whatever the Rebels were fighting for (what they convinced themselves it was), the outcome of the war made them appear to have been fighting for slavery. Not against the tyranny of the federal government that was trying to take away from the states their right of self-determination, their right to decide for themselves how they might live. Because the Civil War, one of the defining events in our history, was for a Southerner a catastrophe from which in some places it has never recovered. In the Official History of the American Civil War, the problem of slavery was solved in 1863. We have been absolved of our sin. But have we?
In his brilliant essay on Faulkner, "The Secret of the South," Alfred Kazin wrote:
"There was a great guilt incurred in the South, a curse was put on the land that was given to all men freely to enjoy. Faulkner does not excuse this guilt, he does not apologize for it, he does not evade it. He is a Southerner and has a great story to tell. Man's immortality, if he can be said to have onecat all, reaches into the past, not into the future: it lies in a candid sense of history." (2)
(1) See "Victory to the Victims".
(2) Alfred Kazin, The Bright Book of Life.
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