Frank Conner
Newnan, GA: Collards Publishing Company, 2002
$34.95
752 pp.
Reviewed by William Scott
They were fighting for the things for which men have always fought: family, faith, friends and country. For the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods.
—Patrick J. Buchanan
The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the war that, more than any other, defined America’s form of government—the 1861–1865 struggle by the Confederate States of America for withdrawal from the union created by colonial secession from Great Britain. This war continues to illuminate sharp divides in American political, social, and cultural thought 138 years after it effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. It is a measure of the degree of unresolved conflict still extant that partisans of the conflict cannot agree even on the name by which the war should be called. The winners long ago decreed it a “civil war.” But no honest person, Southern or otherwise, can seriously contend that the South was vying for control of the residual nation left after eleven Southern states began their bid for separation. Southerners will accept the neutral War between the States appellation (and even convinced Congress to pass a resolution to that effect in the 1920s, when political correctness was but a gleam in the eye of the Frankfurt School’s odious minions). But, many Southerners see the war for what it really was—the War for Southern Independence.
A number of books supporting the Southern cause have appeared recently, many by non-Southerners. Perhaps this reflects a growing consciousness of the ugliness liberalism has inflicted on America as well as a renewed appreciation for the essentially conservative character of the Old South. Most of these books have focused on historical aspects of the war: e.g., the causes of the war, the character of Abraham Lincoln, a more balanced view of the conditions imposed on African slaves, etc. Among the more useful are Charles Adams’s When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, Jeffery Hummell’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, Webb Garrison’s The Lincoln No One Knows, Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln, Greg Durand’s America’s Caesar, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1975, reissued in 1995), John C. Perry’s Myths and Realities of American Slavery, and Donald Kennedy’s Myths of American Slavery. Untainted by political correctness, they do much to weaken the ideological and moral chains imposed on the losers. However, most do not deal with the issues that were under contention during the war as they apply to modern Americans.
But nothing remains static for long, and once Pandora’s box was opened, questioning the past was certain to lead to questions about the present. This is certainly the case with Frank Connor’s The South under Siege. Connor devotes much of his massive 700–plus-page text to a review of the history of the South from the founding era up to the present. However, the underlying purpose is not to rehash history but to reawaken a spirit of cultural identity and activism among Southerners concerned with the direction America has taken in the half century since World War II.
Today the U.S. social fabric continues to be shredded by a series of battles in a cultural war that was proclaimed clearly as such in the late 1980s. Today we see almost-daily battles over: preferential treatment of “victim” groups; the banishment of Christian values from the mores enforced by federal, state and local governments; unlimited sex and violence in our mass-entertainment media; the steady destruction of the family; theoretical rehabilitation versus real punishment of criminals; environmentalism as a means of totalitarian control; animal rights; and on and on and on….
This leads to a key question: What inspires Southerners to cling to the Lost Cause long after its memory has grown cold? A thoughtful neutral observer might say that the losers of any war remember the outcome longer than the winners. A Southerner might counter that, in the fundamental points contended by the war, the South was right. But the truth is likely to be found at a deeper, more fundamental level. While the South lost its struggle for separation, it did not lose its sense of identity. This sense of identity is a valuable commodity as immigration remakes America into a Third World country; as non-Christian and anti-Christian values displace America’s historical European (and predominantly British) culture; and as growth of corporate and government power erodes the freedoms Americans once took for granted. Ultimately, the war was not about slavery vs. freedom, or about tariffs vs. free trade, or about states rights vs. a consolidated federal government, or even about Christianity vs. secular humanism—all of which causes have been suggested at one time or another.
Rather, the War for Southern Independence was a desperate struggle for the survival of a distinct people. In other words, it was a war for national existence—where “nation” is defined, as it has been throughout history, as a collection of related peoples, united by language, faith, culture, traditions, values, and, most important, shared bloodlines.
Connor has tapped into the early stages of a potentially important political development—an emerging resurgence of Southern consciousness. There already exist several organizations operating within the political system—the League of the South, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, among others. The driving force behind each group is dissatisfaction with a nation remade in the image of global mercantilism, centralized government, secular humanism, and radical multiculturalism.
Standing against this onslaught, the Southern awakening is arguably the only truly revolutionary movement in America today.
To be sure, conventional conservatism—in the form of Second Amendment organizations, the Christian community, home schoolers, anti-abortion activists, anti-gay groups, fiscal conservatives, Tenth Amendment advocates, immigration control activists, and others—wields considerable influence. (If it did not, neo-conservatives would not be working so assiduously to co-opt it from within.) Elections are still won and lost as these groups energize members to work for issues and candidates and to show up at the polls. But most of these groups are single-issue oriented. The idea that their battle is part of a larger culture war and that strategic alliances are necessary for victory is beyond their ken. It can be legitimately asked: If any of these groups achieved complete victory, would America’s trajectory through history change in any meaningful way? With the exception of the movement for immigration reform—which is at least as important as cultural renewal and certainly as urgent—a complete victory for any of these groups would serve as little more than a temporary dam across one tributary of the flood that is sweeping America.
Not so Southern resurgence. While still embryonic in form, the Southern awakening carries with it the historical, cultural, and moral legacy of an ultimate struggle for political sovereignty by a culturally distinct people. The Confederate Battle Flag, under increasing attack as a supposed symbol of slavery, is in reality the symbol of a nation in being through four years of conflict, pain, and tragedy. The Flag’s supporters view it is as the legitimate symbol of the aspirations of America’s republican founders—a mantle that supporters of the unitary state created by Abraham Lincoln’s war of economic and cultural hegemony cannot claim despite some of the most bizarre rhetorical contortions ever uttered. While some may question the value of fighting heritage battles, in reality they serve a vital purpose. All struggles must have symbols and issues that arouse people from lethargy and inspire their participation. Southern heritage is such an issue. Its symbols are potent icons of cultural identity—an explicit and unmistakable rallying point for resistance.
Once set in motion, who is to say where this struggle will lead—or whether it will remain confined to the South? Indeed, many Southern activists would argue that they are already on the front line of the wider culture war. It is not surprising that the left fears the South and devotes inordinate resources to its suppression. Its intentions set firmly on global empire, the ruling oligarchy is not so foolish as to miss the meaning of Southern symbols—or the power they convey to their defenders. Though still small, fragile and divided, the new Southern consciousness has the latent potential to completely thwart the left’s goals—a destiny directly attributable to the one characteristic that distinguishes it from all other conservative ideals. Unlike its apparent siblings, it is not about a single issue—the immediate focus of Battle Flag defenders notwithstanding. Indeed, the Southern cause is not about an issue at all. It is about the cultural identity of a people and the intrinsic sense of distinctiveness they must possess in order to survive. It is about nationhood—the one force that, throughout history, has stood between oligarchies and their consolidation of empire.
The urge that impels its adherents onward is buried deep within—often inchoate, rarely conscious. But it is all the more powerful for that—an ineradicable imprint passed down through countless generations of forebears. It will rise up again, Phoenix-like, with each new generation. William Faulkner captured its essence in Intruder in the Dust:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave, yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time…