The "Dixie" Conundrum
When, still in the heat of the progressive political upsurge
of the 60s, The Band recorded "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,"
I can't remember anyone complaining. It
was, of course, The Band – the group that had brought groundedness back to the
psychedelic soaring of later 60s rock, the group that posed with its family
members for the inner cover of its first album.
I remember one deeply sensitive, thoughtful poet saying to me, “I’m glad they wrote that.” I agreed.
Why? For lots of
reasons. It was a bridge, many of us
thought: a hand extended across the gulf
that (still) divided North and South, an attempt to “make their pain our pain,”
to use the vernacular of a later time.
But there was more. Anyone who’s
lived in the South knows that, particularly among the poor, the farmers and the
laborers – white, I’m talking about here – there can be a decency, a personal
intimacy that is utterly foreign to the urban, then-industrial life led in New
York, Chicago or L.A of the 60s. And
anyone who’d reflected on it at all knew that the people who’d thought they
were fighting for that decency – under the banner of “way of life” – had
suffered a spiritual defeat at Appomattox, and that nothing represented that
decency, nor its dignity in defeat, than the figure of Lee.
But, of course, that was “family history” – even for those
of us who demanded civil rights, an end to war, and a humane social order. We saw the Civil War as “our” [American] story,
whichever side we were on, and we felt permitted to build a bridge, extend a
hand, to those across the gulf of defeat.
Later, we became wiser. For we
learned that the Civil War had been part of a global 19th century in
which America had come late to the abolition of slavery; and we saw that it had
solved nothing except the notion that one human being could own another –
something that should have been an utterly unthinkable notion in a democratic
society. But, in no small part because
it lacked a guiding hand of the kind that got it through the war, there was no
follow-through to the defeat of the South – none. The South was punished, but the “freedmen”
were left to languish in American apartheid for another century – about the
time that passed between Appomattox and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And even after the African American Spring
began, even after it seemed to produce its ultimate product with a black
president, we learned – nightmarishly – that the succubus of racism had lived
on through what seemed to be times of progress, to emerge with a vengeance in a
time when many of us had thought it had been consigned to the dustbin of
history.
Though I was born in Ft. Lee, Virginia, a few hundred yards
from The Crater produced when Union troops tried (unsuccessfully) to tunnel
under Confederate lines and plant explosives that would end the brutal,
10-month long siege of Petersburg, I have no attachment to the South. But I do know what those who love the South
mean when they say that it offers a more “personal” and “intimate” experience.
(Even one of my black friends in college, a veteran of the voter registration
drives in Alabama, once said he’d rather face the honest venom of a white
Southerner than the sterile invisibility cast over him by Northerners.) And I wonder what to do about those very
personal, human Virgil Caines who’ve worked the land, chopped wood when “the
money’s no good”, and lived to see “the best” taken from them.
This is a murderously difficult question. But, if America is ever to recover from the
tailspin into which it has stumbled in the last four or more decades, it must
be dealt with. And I suggest we start
here: the bulk of the soldiers in the
Confederate army did not own slaves, or owned less than five; mass slavery – what
we might call “assembly line” slavery, was a privilege granted (by virtue of
income) primarily to those we might call “the 1%”. (Actually the 15-20%, but
it’s the same difference.)[1] Those mass-owners stood to lose the most from
abolition, not only by virtue of what they stood to lose in the present, but by
virtue of what they stood to lose in the future: the plans of the owners of vast numbers of
slaves envisioned slavery expanding, not only into the US territories slated to
become states, but the countries of the Caribbean basin, into which they hoped
to expand. They were the ones who pushed
the “way of life” justification with the poor white farmers in rallying them to
war. (That’s not to say the poor whites weren’t racist: but the clarion call of the rich slave owners
to defend their honor was what helped make democratic reconstruction and
reconciliation after the war impossible.)
So let’s start by recognizing that the Civil War was the
product of an avaricious, immoral and racist elite determined to protect its horrifically
predatory way of life and not averse to using white supremacy to feed the
flames of the war it hoped would give it license to behave in the most
primitive way imaginable: the ownership
and breeding of other humans for its own profit. Let’s try to find ways to understand those
who thought they’d lost everything, even though they may have had little or
nothing to lose by comparison with those who rallied them to war. And let’s find a way to allow them to memorialize
both their loss and the way they were manipulated. Virgil Caine’s descendants might well have
been among those who recognized the need for change when the Civil Rights
movement began; or they might have once again been duped in our own time by the
avaricious demagogues who wish to cover up how ruthlessly they’ve devoured the
wherewithal of the dying middle class of our own time. Whichever, or whatever, we need to find a way
to acknowledge their story without dismissing the gravity of the mistakes that
were made as it unfolded. “The Night
They Drove Old Dixie Down” isn’t perfect.
But it’s a start.
[1] This
is a figure of much contention. But if
we appraise those who stood to lose fortunes if abolition were enacted, as
opposed to those who might lose – or have to hire as wage laborers – a hand or
two on the hard-scrabble family farm, the former were clearly the elite
majority and the power brokers who pushed for succession and war.
