The End of the Myth, page 15
1.
In the years after the Civil War, northerners and southerners found “rare common ground,” write historians Boyd Cothran and Ari Kelman, on the need to acquire more ground. They agreed on nearly nothing, only that the “Army should pacify Western tribes.” White southerners bitterly opposed Reconstruction, a military occupation imposed on the entire defeated Confederacy, but they came together with northerners “on the subject of Manifest Destiny.”2
Demilitarization from the Civil War freed up resources for the militarization of the frontier, as the end of Reconstruction in 1877 allowed the U.S. Army to focus its attention on the final pacification of Native Americans. Thousands of northern and southern soldiers were sent west to fight the end stage in the long war for the continent, which, between 1865 and 1891, included thirteen different campaigns and over one thousand separate battles against the Cheyenne, Lakota, Navajo, Arapaho, Sioux, Ute, Bannock, Modoc, and other peoples.
It was too soon for Confederate generals, colonels, and captains to be admitted into the Union Army. So distinguished northern officers—men like George Armstrong Custer and Philip Sheridan—commanded the troops who committed most of the atrocities against indigenous peoples. Even before the Civil War was over, Lincoln had sent General John Pope to put down the Dakota Sioux. Pope, who had lost to Robert E. Lee at the Second Battle of Bull Run, presided over the “largest mass execution in the nation’s history: 38 Dakotas were hanged the day after Christmas 1862.”3 Another Union hero who also had fought in the Mexican–American War, pioneer legend Kit Carson, drove eight thousand Navajo men, women, and children on a three-hundred-mile “Long Walk” from Arizona to New Mexico, where they endured years of “humiliation, suffering, death, and near starvation”—one of many “trails of tears” that took place during and after the Civil War, as removal never really ended.4
But southern veterans and their sons used the pacification of the West, and beyond, as their rehabilitation program. The military career of Luther Hare, the son of a Confederate captain and among the first class of southerners readmitted into West Point, is illustrative. After Hare graduated from the academy in 1874, his detachment was assigned to the western frontier, where he took part in Custer’s campaign against the Sioux. It was still too early to fly the Confederate battle flag, which was treated like contraband during Reconstruction. Not, though, to let out a Texas-style battle cry. Cornered in a skirmish that preceded Little Big Horn, Hare “opened fire and let out a rebel yell. ‘If we’ve got to die, let’s die like men! I’m a fightin’ son of a bitch from Texas!’” he reportedly said. Hare survived and then went on to fight Native Americans in Montana, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and Arizona. He joined with Oliver Otis Howard to help pacify the Nez Perce, fought the Sioux, and, as he put it, pacified the “last of the renegade Apaches,” before being sent to the Philippines as a colonel.5 There, he led the Texas Volunteer Cavalry against the Spanish.
With Reconstruction over and Jim Crow segregation installed in every southern state, Washington sent tens of thousands of troops to take the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam from Spain in the War of 1898, a turning point in Confederate reintegration. Earlier, when slavery was a going concern, southerners had yearned to separate Cuba from Spain and turn it into a slave state (Cuba and Puerto Rico had remained under Spanish rule after the rest of Spanish America won its independence in the 1820s). Now, conquering the island served a different purpose: a chance to prove their patriotism and reconcile with the North.
War with Spain over Cuba had been predicted for decades. An insurgency led mostly by former slaves and free people of color against Spanish rule had raged, off and on, since 1868, creating the kind of chaos on the island that easily justified intervention. The rebels had already won the abolition of slavery and now were demanding independence. In response, Spain had sent its military to put down the insurrection. President Grover Cleveland almost went in in 1896, on the justification that the fighting was threatening U.S. trade; the United States, he said, needed to “protect its own interests and those of its citizens, which are coincident with those of humanity and civilization generally.”6 Then, on February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in the port of Havana, killing hundreds of sailors. When William McKinley, who succeeded Cleveland as president, blamed Spain for the explosion and used it as a pretext to go to war, North and South came together.
What’s done is done, and the Civil War won’t be forgotten, said the News of Lynchburg, Virginia, two days after the explosion. But “thousands of persons in the South are now ready to admit that secession,” the South’s attempt to break from the Union over slavery, “was a mistake.”7
2.
The nation called. All sections responded. “Yes, sir, I fought with Stonewall and faced the fight with Lee,” ran a poem in the Atlanta Constitution, “but if this Union goes to war, make one more gun for me.” To which the Minneapolis Journal responded: “Make it two, old fellow, I want to stand once more beneath the old flag with you as in the days of yore. Our fathers stood together and fought on land and sea the battles fierce that made us a nation of the free.”8 Georgia’s governor said he would personally lead his state’s militia into war. In New York, at the Knickerbocker Theatre, John Philip Sousa introduced a new march, “Unchain the Dogs of War,” into his comic operetta The Bride-Elect, and “audiences went wild with patriotism.” The play toured the country, with that song, a newspaper noted, “encored again and again.”
Southern ports like New Orleans, Charleston, and Tampa were used as staging areas for the invasions of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Northern soldiers passing through New Orleans were glad to see “grizzled old Confederates” cheering them on and saluting the Union flag. Newspapers throughout the South, along with Dixie’s largest veterans association, the United Confederate Veterans, reveled in the exploits of former Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee’s nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, and Alabama’s Joseph Wheeler, who had been appointed to the military by President McKinley as “a token that henceforth we were one country with one flag over all.”9
Wheeler had served as cavalry general in the Civil War and then, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, he was elected to the House of Representatives. “This and this alone,” he said, referring to the invasion of Cuba, “will cause the flag of our country to continue to soar higher and higher and the prestige of this Great Republic to extend its power for good in the farthest corners of the earth.”10 The conversion to Unionism wasn’t seamless. Showing southern grit at the command of a cavalry division, Wheeler, at age sixty-one, disobeyed the orders of his northern superior officer and led a charge against a Spanish fortification. Upon dispersing enemy troops he, according to legend, shouted, “Let’s go, boys! We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again!”11
Representatives from all sections of the country voted in favor of funding the war, but southerners—and their cotton-growing constituents, looking for tariff-free overseas markets—were especially enthusiastic. As President Cleveland had put it, U.S. interests were coincident with those of humanity. “The boys who wore the blue and the boys who wore the gray,” Texas representative Reese De Graffenreid said, “reconciled and reunited in the great and grand bonds of true brotherhood and love, side by side, heart in heart, hand in hand, will go marching on with the one purpose, the one intention, and one exclamation, that is, woe, irretrievable woe, shall betide that country, that nation, and that people against whom a brother American’s blood shall cry to us from the ground.” The senator from Mississippi, a Confederate veteran with the improbable name of Hernando De Soto Money, thought the war an opportunity to teach traits associated with southern valor and strengthen a bourgeois culture that had grown overripe. Any war was better than a “rotting peace that eats out the core and heart of the manhood of this country,” he said. All wars, the senator continued, taught devotion, abnegation, courage, and forced nations to “rise above the petty, the unworthy, the selfish.” But a war for “human liberty and human life” would have an especially “wholesome,” even “purgatorial effect upon this nation.” The United States “will come out of it,” he predicted, “like the Phoenix from its ashes, renewed and with glory.”12
In June 1898, just weeks after U.S. troops landed in Cuba, two train-car loads of Confederate flags arrived in Atlanta for a coming reunion of southern veterans of the war. The southern battle flag would soon festoon the city that Union general William T. Sherman had burned to the ground. At the very center of the celebration’s main venue stood a thirty-foot Confederate flag, flanked by a Cuban and a U.S. flag.
Speech after speech extolled “sublime” war, not just the Civil War but all the wars that made up the nineteenth century—with Mexico, on Native Americans, and now against Spain. One southern veteran spoke of “the gallantry and heroism of your sons as they teach the haughty Spaniard amid the carnage of Santiago to honor and respect the flag of our country, which shall float forever over an ‘indissoluble union of indestructible states.’” War with Spain allowed “our boys” to once more be “wrapped in the folds of the American flag,” said General John Gordon, commander of the United Confederate Veterans, in remarks opening the proceedings.13 Their heroism had led “to the complete and permanent obliteration of all sectional distrusts, and to the establishment of the too long delayed brotherhood and unity of the American people.”14 A year later, in Nashville, a regiment arrived home from Manila just as the local Daughters of the Confederacy had raised a Confederate reunion, with soldiers marching “under old battle torn rebel flags intertwined with the stars and stripes.”15
The War of 1898 was alchemic. It transformed the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy—the preservation of slavery—into humanity’s cause for world freedom. “The Spanish yoke was about to be lifted,” as Evelyn Scott remembers the excitement of her Tennessee childhood, “and by southerners!”16 The South, General Gordon said, was helping to bring “the light of American civilization and the boon of Republican liberty to the oppressed islands of both oceans.”17 General Wheeler, before he shipped out to Cuba, gave a speech on the House floor in which he folded the South’s seditious war for slavery into the country’s long war for freedom.
“Cast a glance backward,” he said, and “reflect.” American history was one long war: first for the frontier against the “wild beasts and savage Indians”; then the American Revolution, followed by the War of 1812 and the War on Mexico. Into this stream of progress Wheeler slipped the Civil War, when “a million brave men” flew “to arms,” not so much to fight each other but to fight for their understanding of freedom.18 The liberation of Cuba would be the next chapter in the procession.
At subsequent meetings of United Spanish War Veterans, the theme that 1898 united a fractured country was repeated over and over again. “I know of no incident that so well indicates the reunion of the North and South,” said Chaplain Arthur Sykes, than the fact that the first two U.S. fatalities in the war were a son of a Union soldier and a son of a Confederate major. “The blood of the North and the blood of the South mingled,” Sykes said, and “forevermore the North and South of the United States were to be united.”19
With Spain defeated, McKinley took a victory tour of the South, pinning a Confederate badge to his lapel and hailing “the valor and the heroism [that] the men from the south and the men of the north have within the past three years … shown in Cuba, in Puerto Rico [and] in the Philippines.” “When we are all on one side,” the president said, with northern industrial power and southern spirit conjoined once again, “we are unconquerable.” Around this time, Congress, after much delay, authorized the return of Confederate flags captured by Union forces during the Civil War to the United Confederate Veterans.
3.
Nothing was truly reconciled, nothing transcended, at least when it came to the country’s founding paradox: the promise of political freedom and the reality of racial subjugation. The alchemy of war didn’t transform chivalric dross into universal humanism. On the contrary, as southerners gradually took the lead in the United States’ military campaign outward, all the dread, resentment, and hate generated by that campaign “poured back within the frame of the South itself,” as the southern writer W. J. Cash wrote in his 1941 classic, The Mind of the South.
The overseas frontier—wars in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti—acted as a prism, refracting the color line abroad back home. In each military occupation and prolonged counterinsurgency they fought, southerners could replay the dissonance of the Confederacy again and again. They could fight in the name of the loftiest ideals—liberty, valor, self-sacrifice, camaraderie—while putting down people of color. The body count in the Caribbean and Pacific was high. U.S. troops killed about fifteen thousand Haitians in battle between 1915 and 1935; tens of thousands of Dominicans between 1916 and 1924; fifty thousand Nicaraguans between 1912 and 1933; and thousands upon thousands of Filipinos between 1898 and 1946. Many more hundreds of thousands from these countries died from disease, famine, and exposure.
In the first rushes of the campaign against Spain, in the spring of 1898, the skin color of the people who lived in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines wasn’t commented on much in the press. It was enough to report that the United States was freeing a trampled-down people. But then Spain was defeated and began to clear the field. And all of a sudden, without an enemy on which to focus attention, newspapers and soldiers started to note the color of the people they were sent to liberate. Letters from soldiers, first in the 1898 campaign and then later in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, are notably similar, lightheartedly narrating to family and friends how they would shoot “niggers,” lynch “niggers,” release “niggers” into the swamp to die, water-torture “niggers,” and use “niggers for target practice.”20
It was all poured back in and blended together, as W. J. Cash said. Over there, foreign enemies could be called nigger, and over here, domestic enemies—labor, farmer, and civil rights organizers, both people of color and their white allies—could be called subversives and anti-American. The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1865 by Confederate veterans but had lain dormant for decades. Now what historians call the “second Ku Klux Klan” emerged, in 1915, led by veterans of 1898. One of the new Klan’s founders, William Joseph Simmons, repeatedly highlighted his military service in testimony he gave to Congress: “I am a veteran of the Spanish–American War. I am a past commander of my Spanish–American war veterans’ post. I am a past national aide-de-camp of the Spanish–American War Veterans’ Association and also a past provisional division commander. I was at one time the senior colonel in command of five regiments.”21 A “heroic veteran of the Spanish–American War” was how one Congressional ally described Simmons (though the historian Linda Gordon writes that Simmons arrived in Cuba after the fighting had ended). Simmons even took the opportunity of his testimony to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: “I have fought a good fight,” Simmons said, “with love toward all, with malice toward none. I shall pursue the right as God shall give me a vision of the right.”
Such Lincolnesque borrowings nicely capture how the War of 1898 both re-legitimated the Confederacy and allowed resurgent racists to drape themselves in the high ideals of a now-reconciled national history. It was all patriotic. Simmons imagined the new Klan as transcendent, a fraternal organization meant to “memorialize” the nation’s great war heroes, including Confederate heroes, a tribute that would “destroy from the hearts of men the Mason and Dixon line” and establish instead “a great American solidarity and a distinctive national consciousness.”22 “Look away, look away, look away, freedom calls,” wrote the Florida Times-Union in 1898, providing new words to an old song, “Dixie.” “We are all Yankees now, Yankee Lee and Yankee Grant.” Eventually, the United Confederate Veterans and the United Spanish War Veterans all but fused into one organization. Brothers!
Not so for the thousands of African Americans who signed up for the U.S. Army in early 1898. African Americans, in general, viewed the war with the same ambivalence they viewed the United States. Many identified with the Cuban rebels, overwhelmingly made up of dark-skinned field hands, many of them former slaves. Others saw the war as their ticket to admission into the U.S. nation, a chance to win a war of liberation for their brothers and sisters overseas and fight at home for full “title to all the privileges of citizenship.”* McKinley, even as he courted the South, made it easier for African Americans to join the military. And many volunteered, joining African American regulars in Florida (many of whom had arrived from the West, buffalo soldiers who were used to fight the Apache, Comanche, Sioux, and Ute). There they waited, mostly in Tampa and Key West, for orders to invade Cuba and Puerto Rico. Throughout the South, with the hardening of Jim Crow rule, African Americans had suffered decades of lynchings, confiscation of property, disenfranchisement, “rifle clubs,” as some white terrorist organizations dubbed themselves, arbitrary prosecution, and chain gangs. The dismantling of Reconstruction in 1877 transformed public spaces into venues of racial domination.
It was not, in other words, an auspicious moment to mix thousands of gun-carrying white men with thousands of gun-carrying black men in Tampa.
A backlash followed. White soldiers and residents rioted and rebelled against the public presence of African American soldiers. In one incident, drunken white soldiers grabbed a two-year-old African American baby from his mother’s arms and used him for target practice (white soldiers would later repeat similar “games” in Haiti). Newspapers throughout the old Confederacy were initially color-blind when it came to celebrating the courage of white soldiers, largely overlooking the fact that their cavaliers were fighting on the side of people of color against Europeans. As the war progressed, however, they gradually woke to the fact that the people the United States was fighting against were white Europeans and that the rebels they were fighting for were black. As captured Spanish prisoners were transported to Florida, the Savannah Tribune expressed “outrage” that “white men” should be “subjected to the humiliation of having negro guards over them.”23 The Atlanta Constitution urged the government not to send African American troops to Cuba to “assault white Cubans.”24 Let them go back west, the paper said, where they could fight Indians and be less noticeable.
