This post is motivated by the recent slaughter of nine innocent people in Charleston, South Carolina. Among the many horrific aspects of this event is the fact that it follows directly out of "southern culture". This aspect and what "southern culture" stands for is getting an airing in the media, finally. The more you look at it the worse it gets. But it has persisted for centuries. And most specifically it has persisted and grown in the wake of the Civil War. Well, actually, if you immerse yourself in southern culture you will find that "Civil War" is some kind of evil northern plot. The proper name for the event is the "War of Northern Aggression". And so it goes. As my contribution to pushing back against southern culture I want to directly attack two tropes that are commonly held by its adherents. They are both closely associated with the Civil War. Here goes.
Bob Lee is almost always given his full name and frequently accorded his title. So he becomes General Robert E. Lee, by inference an esteemed figure. And there is no doubt that he was a great (as in effective) leader of men and a brilliant general. But does he really deserve his esteem which extends far beyond his military exploits?
Lee claimed to be generally apolitical before the war. As a senior military officer he spent what one commentator has called his "contemplative years", those between 1831 and 1856, outside the heart of slave territory. This supposedly contributed to his moderate views. But he married Mary Custis in 1831. She was from a wealthy family that owned a lot of slaves. There was a belief among many that when Mary's father died and Lee took control of the Custis holdings the slaves would be freed. But, as with many other similar situations, this did not happen. If Lee harbored anti-slavery beliefs he never spoke or acted on them with sufficient vigor to put him in conflict with his friends or community, for the most part supporters of southern culture. But the telling decision was the one he took at the start of the war.
Southern culture claims that its adherents are "100% all American patriots". It frequently denigrates people it doesn't like for not being sufficiently patriotic. A typical example of this is the criticism that President Obama was somehow disloyal or un-American because he did not wear an American flag lapel pin when he was out in public for the early part of his term in office. (He quickly decided that this wasn't worth fighting over and has since worn his pin.) Flags are definitely important to these people.
So these people could be accurately described as "America first" people, right? Wrong! When given a choice between putting America first and the state of Virginia first, Lee chose Virginia. And, in general, southerners loyalty starts with southern culture, then descends to their states and only then descends to cover America. The flag they care the most about is not the American flag. It is the Confederate Battle Flag the "stars and bars". As I write this the American flag is flying at half mast over the capitol of South Carolina while the stars and bars is at full staff. These people in general and Bob Lee in particular are not "100% all American patriots". They are perhaps "60% somewhat American and sort of patriots when it suits them". The only thing they are "all out 100%" about is being southern. They are the last people we should turn to as judges of who is a true American patriot and who isn't.
The next issue I want to cover is that of bravery. Southerners are also 100% behind our brave boys in uniform and by "our brave boys" they mean confederate army soldiers. And, of course, they were the bravest of the brave. That's their opinion but it is true? I think not and here's why?
Many people consider the Civil War the first "modern" war. Now this is definitely one of those things where opinions differ but let's take a look at why this opinion is popularly held. And, if you don't try to push things too hard, the idea holds up pretty well. The Civil War saw a lot of innovation introduced that were later broadly adopted. The biggest of these was a complete overhaul of standard military tactics. For a long time before the Civil War the best way to fight a big battle was to put your soldiers into colorful matching uniforms, line them up in rows, and have them have at it. The reason for this was "volley fire". If your army fired volleys of synchronized fire then it pretty much destroyed any army not employing the same tactics. The uniforms and lines were necessary to organize and coordinate the firing of volleys.
But that's not how the Civil War was fought. Why? The Civil War was the first war fought between armies where the average soldier was equipped with a musket with a rifled barrel. The rifling made the gun a lot more accurate. It meant that its effective killing distance was increased by a factor of about three. Before the Civil War standard tactics called for a set of volleys to be fired. This was followed up with a charge that finished the other side off. With unrifled muskets enough charging soldiers could make it across the gap to the other army's line to have a good chance of winning. But the greater accuracy of rifled muskets meant that the soldiers had to begin charging from much further away.
The now much longer distance the charging soldiers had to cover meant that far more of them could be cut down before they reached the other line. In effect the standing soldiers had enough time to thin the lines to the point that the charge was ineffective. Charges no longer worked. And the best defense was no longer a good offense. Instead it consisted of hiding behind something like a tree or a fence and firing from there. In the absence of a handy tree or fence you could go down. The term "fox hole" dates from this period.
To his credit Lee figured all this out early in the war. So he tried to arrange things so that his soldiers were "dug in" behind some kind of cover and the Union soldiers had to march across and then charge across an open area. It took most of the war for the northern generals to figure this out. And being in a position to use the right tactics made a tremendous difference. The battle of Gettysburg proves just how important this difference was.
On the Southern side you had Lee at the height of his powers surrounded by his revered general staff, also at the height of their powers. On the Northern side you had a much inferior general supported by an undistinguished staff. How inferior was the northern general? I'm not going to tell you his name because it doesn't matter. (Look his name up if you care.) What I will tell you is that he was put in charge of the Northern forces a relatively short time before the battle and fired for incompetence not long after the battle. So on one side you have the person most people characterize as the best general of the war and on the other side you have a third rater. So Lee won easily, right? Even the southern culture people know that Lee lost. The battle took three days and was a spectacular defeat for the "Army of Northern Virginia". Oh yes, that's what Lee's army was called. It was not "The Confederate Army". So even in this oh so important matter and at this oh so important time southerners couldn't quite get completely behind the idea of a country.
So why did Lee lose at Gettysburg? Because almost by accident the Northerners held the high ground and were dug in. This caused the Southerners to have to charge uphill across open territory. Southern leadership and southern valor were not enough to overcome the disadvantage of a superior northern position even though the northern army was at best mediocrely led. Lee never made that mistake again. But northern generals frequently did both before and after Gettysburg. Grant even did it at least once late in the war.
And what does this have to do with the valor of the common foot soldier? Their lives were on the line. That caused them to be acutely aware of what was going on. It was no secret that the northern armies were frequently poorly led while the southern armies were generally well led. Soldiers in battle are, of necessity, a fatalistic lot. "When your time is up it's up". Still soldiers in both armies were keenly aware that Bob Lee was a better general than the long line of men that Lincoln put in charge of the northern armies before Grant. So the northern soldiers knew that when they went into battle the battlefield would be tilted, often literally tilted, in favor of the guys on the other side.
But the northern soldiers did their duty in large numbers anyhow all through the war. It is much easier to be brave when you can have faith that your commanding officers know what they are doing and are not wasting the lives of you and your fellow soldiers by doing something stupid. That is how things looked for southern soldiers. Northern soldiers marched into battle over and over knowing that the people in charge had routinely snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. It is far harder to be brave in these circumstances.
When Grant was finally put in charge late in the war he spent lives profligately. But so had his predecessors. The difference was that Grant won where his predecessors had lost. Soldiers know that war involves bloodshed, a lot of it. It says something about the human condition that soldiers have always known this but they march to war and do their duty anyhow. But northern soldiers did not begrudge Grant his blood because Grant got results. And what about southern soldiers, those Reby Boys of my title? Well, late in the war when Lee started losing a lot of them went home. The case is clear. Northern soldiers were a lot braver than their southern counterparts.
Update (added June 24, 2015):
The "confederate flag" has all of a sudden became a subject of intense interest. As a result I now know a lot more about the subject than I did 24 hours ago. And it turns out that some of what I wrote above is incorrect.
For instance, the "Stars and Bars" does not refer to what I called the "Confederate Battle Flag". Instead it refers to the first iteration of the official flag of the Confederate States of America. That design consisted of a blue box in the upper left corner with a circle of white stars in it. The initial design featured seven stars. As additional states joined the confederacy more stars were added. The final total was 13. The rest of the flag, in this iteration, remained constant. It consisted to three equal width horizontal bars. The top and bottom bars were red and the center bar was white. This is certainly a design I am not very familiar with. In fact, I think most people including southerners are unfamiliar with it.
The flag we now most closely associate with the confederacy is based at one remove on what I referred to above as the "Confederate Battle Flag". But it turns out that is not the whole story either. There was no "Confederate Battle Flag". Instead there were separate battle flags for each of the various confederate armies. The most well known of these flags was the one belonging to the Army of Northern Virginia, Bob Lee's Army. And Lee's flag featured a design that differs slightly from what we now think of as the "confederate flag". Lee's flag was a square flag with two blue diagonals that together formed an "X". On the diagonals were a number of white stars. The number varied in a manner similar to that of the Stars and Bars. The rest of the flag was red.
The modern "confederate flag" is identical to another battle flag, that of the Army of Tennessee. The Tennessee battle flag was identical to the Lee flag except that the outline was changed to a rectangle. As far as I can tell, neither of these designs ever acquired a nickname along the lines of "stars and bars". Tennessee's appropriation of the Lee design for its army is indicative of how well known and popular the design was at the time.
But, rather than being adopted wholesale as in the Tennessee case, instead the Lee design was used as a component of a larger design. For instance, the second version of the Confederate Flag incorporated it in the upper left corner as a replacement for the blue box with the circle of stars. In this version the rest of the flag was solid white. The third version of the Confederate flag took the second version as a starting point and added a vertical red bar down the right side of the flag. The Lee flag was also used during the war as a component of various confederate naval ensign designs. (These designs, especially the ensign designs, are even more obscure than that of the stars and bars.) After the war Lee's flag was occasionally used as a component of some state flags, most notably that of Mississippi.
The modern "confederate flag", but actually the battle flag of the army of Tennessee, mostly dates from the '60s and was a reaction to the civil rights movement. And it should be obvious now, but it bears repeating, the design featured so prominently these days was only the flag of one of the various armies, and not even the most prominent one, that fought on the side of the confederacy in the Civil War. It was never a symbol of southern culture more broadly nor of the geographic area we think of as "the south".
When I originally wrote this piece I assumed, silly me, that the people who lie so often about so many things were actually telling the truth, or at least something close to the truth, about something they claim to hold near and dear. I should have known better. My bad.
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