'Us' vs. 'Them'

By Ed Piper

Southerners still view themselves as apart from Northerners.

At least, from the monuments we visited and the people--very friendly, by the way, both black and white--we interacted with on our just-completed trip to South Carolina and Georgia, the descendants of the Confederacy identify as being different from us folks from points north.

The young man, 30-ish, white, who charged us our admission at Old Fort Jackson near downtown Savannah, Georgia, was amiable and didn't have a Southern drawl. But in giving us information on the site, he said, "We (meaning the Confederate side) had a submarine, and they (the Union) had one, too."

This was in response to my wife Dianna's mention about our earlier visit to the lab in Charleston, South Carolina, analyzing the H.L. Hunley, a Confederate submersible that sank the U.S.S. Housatonic, then went down itself with all eight men aboard. (The sub is sitting in solution at present, having been cleaned of its outer "concretion" accumulated from 1864, when it went down, to 2000, when it was raised in Charleston Harbor.) (The Hunley was never commissioned, so it is sometimes wrongly referred to as the C.S.S. H.L. Hunley.)

The "us" versus "them" terminology contrasted with the words of the owner of Hillbilly Willie's BBQ in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we ate later in the trip. Working the tables in a right friendly bit of Southern hospitality, this latter gentleman talked in terms of "Northerners" coming down to do battle with the Southerners during the Civil War.

In the Magnolia Cemetery in a rundown part of Charleston, we drove to view the burial places for the 21 crew members of the Hunley. (You note that earlier I said eight men went down with the submarine; they did, but there were two accidents before the torpedoing of the Housatonic, claiming more Confederate sailors' lives.)

There, in the cemetery (which is in bad repair, just as the area of the city surrounding it), the Hunley partisans had been buried with honors after their remains were raised, complete, with the sub in a public ceremony.

In fact, a member of the French Huguenot Church we visited in Charleston told me with evident pride that she had been present in the harbor on the day the Hunley was raised, after 136 years at the bottom. She said there was a big ceremony, with a lot of fanfare.

I asked Dianna at one point of the trip: Did anyone ever think of these men fighting against their own rightly-established federal government as being guilty of treason?

In the areas we traveled to, and on the interpretive materials provided at historical sites, we were informed that men who took up arms for the Confederacy "made the ultimate sacrifice" (if they died), were dedicated and honorable men, and the like. I don't know that the Civil War is still being fought now in the minds of many (or most) white people in the South. But they, from all indications, carry a mindset of us versus them.

I need to clarify something from my second paragraph. Black and white folks down South, we found to be very friendly and willing to take the time to talk (something I don't always slow down to do back home in San Diego). But I have yet to encounter an African-American who speaks up for the cause of the Confederacy. Only white folks in the South, of those we've met and interacted with, do that.

An African-American woman who checked us in at our hotel in Savannah, while beyond friendly, gracious, and helpful to us as we arrived tired after a day of travel from Charleston followed by activities, made clear she wished us all the best in visiting Civil War-related sites--but she wanted no part of it herself. "I can know history, but I don't have to relive it," she said in a boundary-making statement I found very sensible and articulate.

John, the volunteer tour guide at Fort Pulaski, outside Savannah, was a fish out of water in these parts. When we came upon him prior to our 1:00 tour of the fort, administered by the National Park Service, he was engaged in an exchange with another white Southerner, a woman, who had just taken his earlier tour.


"Your comments about the Lost Cause (the myth that the South lost a glorious struggle against Northern oppression in the Civil War, fighting for state's rights rather than to preserve slavery), I have a problem with," this 30's-something woman said, obviously emotional. John, who grew up being inculcated in Lost Cause thinking by his parents, had debunked it in comments during the tour.

Said she, "Women and children in the South were tortured by Union soldiers. They were maimed."

John, thoroughly calm, replied, "Let's not let facts get in the way of a good story." He went on to acknowledge that bad things were done by the Union army, but he said bad things were done by both side. "In the Gettysburg campaign," he pointed out to her, "the Confederate army committed some abuses." His response to the lady was that reports of attacks and mistreatment of civilians by Union soldiers were exaggerated to support Southern claims.

But she wasn't having it. Her voice tremored as she concluded the exchange, "Well, thank you for the tour," and headed for the front gate.