While we're sorting through the fog of the current war, we might as well spend some more time sorting through the fog of an older war. Today's Edward Sebesta page quotation for April 13 has to do with a race riot of 1898 in Wilmington NC. He gives the reaction of one Confederate veterans' publication and then provides some links for factual material on the riot.
Sebesta is looking not just at the history and prehistory of the Civil War. He's also presenting glimpses of how the Lost Cause version of the Civil War was manunfactured and propagated in the postwar period. The Confederate veterans' groups were a key way in which this occurred.
Again in the spirit of adding some extra bit of value to the process myself, I'll mention something related to the situation in the prewar (antebellum) Old South. Because the Lost Cause version of history is really dishonest pseudohistory - not an interpretation of history so much as an ideologically based lie about history - almost any honest and conscientious attempt to understand US history around the Civil War is an antidote to the Lost Cause approach that the neo-Confederates promote today.
Since today's Sebesta selection is about North Carolina, it's a good time to mention this online resource made available by today's University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: North American Slave Narratives. At the Collection of Electronic Texts link, they have dozens of slave narratives available there. Some are relatively well known, like the Frederick Douglass autobiographies and Henry Bibb's Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Others are less well known.
I've read a few slave narratives, including the ones just mentioned. There's one that I haven't read, by a slave named Andrew Jackson. They provide a first-hand look at life in pre-Civil War days, and they provide a more complete, realistic and nuanced version of slavery than is normally found in slavery apologetics from the period. And I do mean nuanced, because these are stories about real people living in slavery and describing from their individual perspectives the lives they led under that system.
As with any text, they have to be read with a critical eye. But it's really a great thing that so many of these texts are available in full at this UNC site.
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