Sometimes, as a nation, America fights to forget. It is not a matter of memories fading slowly away. Consciously or by act of will, a way to escape the blood-stained acts of the past and ongoing brutalities of the present – and the ways in which the two are tightly connected.
Take a glance at two words that emerged in the Civil War: carpetbagger, which is still in regular use; and copperhead, which is pretty much the province of specialists and historians Yet, the first is a lie and the second represents a profound, if complex truth.
Despite the North’s imposition of a “soft” peace, the South started a war on honesty and reality long before the Civil War began – one that bore a terrible fruit; one that exploded into the vile Lost Cause fiction and racist violence in America.
Carpetbaggers is an epithet created by members of the defeated south to describe the courageous supporters of the creation of a free South land. Copperhead describes Northerners who were friendly to the South. Most carpetbaggers were trying to bring peace and justice to the South and make sure African American strength and labor was no longer stolen.
Copperheads were more than sympathetic to the South. Most were fanatically racist and willing to have given away anything, most especially Black freedom, to end the conflict. Asking for people to not minimize this word is not an act of cancellation, but respect and civility. All the hateful force behind copperhead’s power killed people and maimed lives, with at least 12 million kidnapped on the Middle Passage, two million lost as “wastage,” and untold tens of thousands annihilated in terrorist, white supremacist fury.
Naming a restaurant “The Copperhead Club” is just another step to normalizing the false narrative of the Lost Cause and the inexcusable racism of such poisonous movies as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind. Birth fueled the rebirth of the Klu Klux Klan. Gone helped reinforce the apartheid regime that ruled virtually all of the South, and much of the North until a scant generation ago.
We are nowhere near owning the terrible horrors of our nation’s past. Gone with the Wind called the Old South “a dream remembered.” It was a nightmare. “Meet General Grant,” a bestselling biography, performed the Stalinist task of rendering Black participation in the Civil War invisible, saying “American Negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far as I know, that ever became free without any effort of their own.”
Tell that to the 182,000 soldiers who volunteered, the thousands who were killed or massacred by Southern “cavaliers,” and the 750,000 who fled plantations after the Emancipation Proclamation.. Own that pre-Civil War America was a place as authoritarian as Nazi occupied Europe, where the phrase “Papers, please,” could mean sudden shipment to the Deep South, where enslaved people’s life expectancy was seven to nine years. Was there freedom of speech in the South? Men were shot and died as their printing equipment was thrown in rivers to rust and rot.
Beautiful words helped America declare its independence. Vile ones almost broke our nation. Declaring history doesn’t matter betrays our most fundamental values and lays the foundation for future abuse. We may not like parts of our past, but we disown and disrespect them at our peril.
Tony Seideman has been a Peekskill resident for the past 25 years. He was involved in the development of the Lincoln Depot Museum and a regular contributor to the print edition of Peekskill Herald.
