“Everybody in the Mississippi Delta was a racist, white or black. Racism was built into our bones. It is a thing we will never recover from having committed, but it also had its side that we always benefitted from…I lived in a society that was filled with horrors, as you look back on it. They were not horrors at the time.” – Shelby Foote
They say that time heals all wounds, but the maxim only applies if the wounds are properly tended to. You can’t just leave a gaping sore open to the influence of the oppressive environment in which it was born and it expect it to get better. No, a wound left untended amongst a sea of malignant influences is sure to bloom with miasmatic glory before long. By the same token, no healing is going to take place if the regeneration of flesh is interrupted by a public that believes the best course of action is to perpetually pick at the wound with their cruddy, unwashed fingertips, waiting until little rivulets of pus and blood begin to run down their arm before they finally stop long enough to let it to scab over again. Time alone is sufficient for the mending of paper cuts and carpet burns, but when it comes to the deep, ravenous gashes that cut down to the bone, it is nothing more than an incubation period. The reality is that time is a neutral agent—something that possesses the ability to help and harm our collective injuries in equal measure. It does not heal. It does not hurt. It merely facilitates.
During his Second Inaugural, President Lincoln spoke of the necessity of “binding up the nation’s wounds” and caring for those who had borne the battle if we were ever to see a prolonged peace. He acknowledged the contradictions of war and spoke to the absurdities that spring from it, asking how it could be that two groups of men who read the same Bible and worshiped the same god could pray for victory over their enemy and expect Him to answer one group’s prayer, but not the other. By the end of his address, Lincoln had framed the Civil War and all of the suffering attendant to it as a sort of divine reckoning that had come and would come to pass over a nation which had harvested the fruits of slavery for 250 years,saying:
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
It has been nearly 150 years since President Lincoln let his countrymen know the debt he believed we owed to our creator and, 150 years later, we have yet to pay it off. Well, to be fair, we’ve already paid one half of the debt off. Or at least I hope we have. Call me an optimist, but I would think that the Civil War itself would be enough to atone for all of the blood that had been drawn by the lash during the course of American slavery. That’s not to say that the country didn’t immediately start accruing more cosmic debt from the moment Reconstruction started, but I’d like to think that more than 700,000 gallons of blood in a 4 year span would satiate whatever bloodlust god had up to the point.(1) It’s that whole accumulation of ill-gotten wealth from 250 years unrequited toil part that we’ve never really made a lot of progress on.
Earlier in his Second Inaugural, Lincoln made a covert dig at the morality of the Confederate position on slavery when he commented on the strangeness of a people asking, “a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” To a modern reader, it might seem like a strange choice of words, but his audience in 1865 was likely to pick up on the biblical allusion Lincoln was making. In the Book of Genesis, god puts a curse upon the ground after discovering that Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, telling Adam that, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”With this as context, it would seem that Lincoln is painting the practice of slavery as a violation of god’s will as it is an economic system designed to absolve one group of people from the curse of god on the land by making another group bear twice the burden. It is not so much a condemnation of the particular institution of slavery as it is the practice of systematically exploiting the labor of your fellow-man for unearned personal gain. Had he lived through Reconstruction, I have little doubt that Lincoln would have been just as disgusted with the practices of sharecropping and convict leasing as he was with slavery and that he would have done everything in his power as President to stifle their spread through the South.
But, Lincoln did not live through Reconstruction. In fact, he didn’t even make it through the second month of his second term, thanks to a deranged Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth who decided it was incumbent upon himself to avenge Old Dixie by assassinating our 16th President in the middle of a showing of Our American Cousin. Tragically, Booth’s nerve was not shared by one of his co-conspirators, George Atzerodt, who was supposed the kill Vice President Andrew Johnson on that same night, but got cold feet. Thus, we had a situation in which the greatest President our nation had ever known was assassinated, only to be replaced by a man who would prove to be the one of the worst we’ve ever had to endure.
From his quick and largely consequence free reinstatement of former Confederate leaders and endorsement of discriminatory Black Codes in many Southern states, to his vetoing of legislation that proposed civil rights increases and an extension for the Freedman’s Bureau, Johnson played the part of the white supremacist savior, effectively killing off any hope that the civil rights of blacks in this country would go beyond mere emancipation in the near future. The slaves had been nominally given their freedom, but Johnson was determined that they shouldn’t be given anything else. Under his watch, the rights and opportunities available to white men would not be extended to any other race and the ascendency of a new American hatred would begin.
In the span of three years, our country went from a President who urged his fellow Americans to have malice towards none and charity towards all to a President who demonized one section of the population for the benefit of another and unironically warned that if the black race, “obtains the ascendency over the [white race], it will govern with reference only to its own interests for it will recognize no common interest–and create such a tyranny as this continent has never yet witnessed.” In Andrew Johnson’s words you can hear the contempt and revulsion for his fellow-man burbling out in a sea of incoherent hatred. You can see his words spurring on the basest nature of the white southern plebians from which he sprang, settling in them a vicious enmity towards their black brothers and sisters that would cause them to ignore the grave injustices being perpetrated against them by their patrician white fellows. Most of all, you can feel that scar tissue that was built up after Gettysburg and Appomatox and Shiloh begin to slowly crack open, exposing those tender wounds of ours to infection and disease and rot. There would be no healing there.
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Despite the inevitable protestations of some of their neighboring states in the deep south, I think there is no question that the State of Mississippi is the most enduring legacy of the Confederacy. Sure, South Carolina can lay claim to being the first state to secede from the union and Alabama can hold tight to the knowledge that their state legislature still meets in the building that was once the Confederate Capitol, but they can’t quite compare with the sheer scope and volume of Mississippi’s rebel worship. South Carolina wants to offend some folks by continuing to fly the Confederate flag at their state capitol? Well, that just means Mississippi’s going to have to one up them and actually stick the stars and bars in the design of their own state flag. Alabama’s feeling pretty good because it named a community college after Jefferson Davis? Mississippi named an entire county after the son of a bitch. Hell, the nickname for the University of Mississippi’s sports teams is the Rebels and, until 2010, the mascot for the school was an antebellum plantation owner named “Colonel Reb”.
But all of those are just some of the cosmetic heirlooms of Mississippi’s Confederate past. Yes, they are racially and culturally insensitive and, yes, they honor the legacies of some of the most oppressive bigots in our nation’s history, but at the end of the day they’re still largely symbolic. The Magnolia State’s true antebellum inheritance can be seen in the day to day lives of the majority of its nearly 3 million residents, who are still shouldering the burden of a white ruling class that has consistently thumbed their nose at President Lincoln’s words of warning by continuing to pile up tarnished wealth from the bondsman’s unrequited toil, even if the bondsman has been relabeled a sharecropper or a minimum-wage worker.
Statistically speaking, Mississippi is the most downtrodden and depressing state in all of America.
No matter which direction you go, the signs and symptoms of this perpetual oppression will make themselves readily apparent to you. Drive yourself southeast from Greenville to Gulfport or northwest from Clinton to Corinth—it doesn’t matter. You can drive in concentric circles around Jackson for all I care, because regardless of where you want to start off from or where you plan on going, the end product will be the same: poverty. With nearly 1 in 4 Mississippians living below the poverty line, the Magnolia State is far and away the most impoverished in America, besting the state with the 2nd largest percentage of impoverished residents by more than 3 percentage points. Mississippi can also lay claim to an unmatched ubiquity of poverty as well, as every one of Mississippi’s 82 counties—save DeSoto, Madison and Rankin Counties—has a poverty rate that is above the national average of 15.9%.
Of course, being the poorest state in the union, it should come as no surprise that Mississippi comes in dead last—or first, depending on how you look at it—in a slew of other unenviable categories, but I have to admit that it is still shocking to see just how much worse off Mississippians are then everyone else in the country. How bad is it? Well, Mississippi ranks last in median household income, per capita personal income, overall health outcomes,diabetes rates, obesity rates, average life expectancy, cardiovascular deaths, infant mortality, infants with low birthweight, teen pregnancy rate and high school graduation rates. Statistically speaking, Mississippi is the most downtrodden and depressing state in all of America. The only consolation they can glean from their collective misfortune is that the rest of the South is, to varying degrees, experiencing the same health, wealth and education disparities as they are. In fact, things are so bad in the South that the region is responsible for 11 of the 12 twelve states with the lowest life expectancies(2) and can point to only one state (Virginia) that has a median household income higher than the national average. I’m not positive on this one, but I’m pretty sure that dropping out of high school, having a baby when you’re 15, getting a meager paycheck and dying early isn’t what folks mean when they talk about preserving “the Southern way of life.”
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(1) For those wondering where the 700,000 gallon number came from and want to nerd out, keep reading. If the average percentage of the human body that is blood is about 7% and the average Civil War soldier weighed 143 lbs, that would mean that the average Civil War soldier had roughly 10 lbs of blood in him. Now, if you know that there are 8.85 lbs in a gallon of blood, then you can figure out that 10 lbs of blood—or one soldier—is about 1.13 gallons Then, all you have to do is multiply those 1.13 gallons by the number of casualties in the Civil War, which was about 620,000, and you have the final figure of 700,600 gallons of blood.
(2) The abberant 12th state here is West Virginia, who is pretty well situated just above Mississippi as the 2nd worst in many of these metrics. West Virginia could be classified as part of a very loosely defined South, but for the most part it’s simply an Appalachian no man’s land, with no definitive association with folks on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.
The Interesting thing to me, is that when the Southern States LEGALLY seceded from the U.S. (As there was never a law or amendment to the 1787/1789 U.S. CONstitution making secession an illegal act) the U.S. was free of Slavery, and could have simply amended their CONstitution to make it so. Slavery has nothing to do with the legality of secession. There was no thirteenth amendment to the 1787/1789 U.S. CONstitution making slavery illegal or unlawful, in such case we must refer to the tenth amendment which plainly and clearly states…..
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Respectively means INDIVIDUALLY, therefore secession was a power reserved by each State individually, THE ISSUE WAS NOT LEFT TO THE COLLECTIVE, OR THE MAJORITY OF THE COLLECTIVE OF STATES.
There was no amendment stating Secession was an unlawful or illegal act, moreover interestingly no such amendment has been made to date.
So the questions that beg to be answered are:
Why was the U.S. not simply satisfied to see an end to slavery in the U.S. with the Secession of the Southern States? Why go to war to end slavery in foreign States such as those united in the Southern Confederacy,while the U.S. Continued its crusade to exterminate the Native American Indian?
Why was this crusade to end slavery not continued to other foreign States: Such as those in South America?
If the aim was to preserve the union, then let us now review International law on the subject…..
“Treaties are not necessarily permanently binding upon the signatory parties. As obligations in international law are traditionally viewed as arising only from the consent of states
When a state withdraws from a multi-lateral treaty, that treaty will still otherwise remain in force among the other parties, unless, of course, otherwise should or could be interpreted as agreed upon between the remaining states parties to the treaty.”
The States that were party to the 1787/1789 U.S. CONstitution were sovereign entities, thus making that CONstitution a treaty between sovereigns.
Lincoln and the Northern States committed an act of rebellion/insurrection against the lawful authority of the 1787/1789 U.S. CONstitution via their violation of the tenth amendment, assuming powers not delegated to the U.S. (The Collective of States), but reserved to each State individually.
While Slavery was indeed horrible, but so was the U.S. Extermination of the Native American Indian, which continued long after 1865, Neither act is justification for the other, neither hold a greater moral position over the other. The only solution is for the Southern Confederate States to be restored, an end to the occupation of those States by the U.S. and that they be allowed to move forward, establishing a greater freedom to all of its people than the U.S. offers to all of its people………..
I graduated in Mississippi from HS…after moving there from California when I was 15..
Hi, Drew,
Another interesting piece, in part because of the unusual movement between facts and feelings. Your presentations in class had the same passion.
I’d probably lump WV with the South, although I’m ambivalent. It was nominally Northern during the Civil War, but Federal troops had to fight to maintain that status. Soon after the war, my understanding is that it swung Southern, and even moved its capital from northern WV to southern WV because of these sympathies. These days, in my experience, it feels more emotionally aligned with the South. In the 1980s, I heard many more pro-Southern sympathies expressed in WV than pro-Northern.
The honest strides have been going on for awhile. I’m all for educating people but this state can’t even do that with a tax base so low that they can’t fix the schools, hire enough state police, build parks, etc. This is one problem that requires money and getting business here will raise that money and the standard of living. That’s hard to do when the state has such a bad name that no one wants to come here. How long should an entire state be punished?
I’ll have to think about this one too, but I will say this… Facts are facts no matter how one may try to change them. They can’t be changed, and talking about a fact doesn’t perpetuate it, it educates others. The change comes when one can acknowledge and APOLOGIZE for their wrong doing and make honest strides to change their beliefs and behaviors!
I don’t know wether this makes me sad, angry, or both. Mississippi has become my home, I have live here and travelled through this beautiful state for the past 8 years. Part of the problem, as I see it, is the reputation that is oppressing the entire state. People are genuinely shocked when they find that most Mississippians do, in fact, own shoes. I’ve seen someone dismiss my argument because “he’s from Mississippi, he isn’t even educated” and many similar comments. This is a beautiful and amazing state, home of some of the greatest blues artists this world has ever known. This state has hope, no matter how hard the rest of the nation kicks it. This state needs help, and the biggest help is not perpetuating stereotypes of its residents. We need business, beyond the massive Nissan plant. We need to increase the tax base in order to correct many of the issues this wonderful place faces. There are problems here but they are not insurmountable. Perpetuating how horrible Mississippi is doesn’t help anyone. I challenge you to come see the many good things that are happening, look at the ways this state is trying to change and bring itself into modernity.