I met up with a teacher the other day that has the
privilege of introducing the Civil War to her fourth graders each year.
The word “introducing” is a little misleading,
however. I live in Georgia where
natives, no matter the ethnicity, are born with “The War” ingrained in our
souls. We can’t escape it, we can’t
deny it – it’s always there. Some of
our earliest collective memories are filled with the statues around the town
square, old family photographs; we hear the stories and see the preserved
battlefields that dot our landscape.
I haven’t met a fourth grade student yet who doesn’t know
something about the Civil War, but the fourth school year is designated by the
Georgia Social Studies curriculum to formally learn about the war in an
academic setting. My own personal
experience indicates students are eager to begin the process. A formal study helps them connect to family
stories still lingering around the Sunday dinner table and helps them sift
through the facts and myths they already know.
I asked my teaching friend how she taught her Civil War
unit. Even with today’s mandated
standards every teacher has his or her own personal methods that make each
lesson unique. I was interested to know
the ingredients to her Civil War unit.
My colleague responded, “Well, we read the text, I add in
some graphic organizers, we build a word wall, and I have some really great
Civil War worksheets.”
I really hoped that wasn’t everything so I asked, “What
is the focal point of your unit….or better yet, what is the culmination of your
unit?”
“Well…..I wrap it up by showing Gone with the Wind over a few days.
I give the unit test, and we move on.”
Oh.
Really?????
Now, I like Gone
with the Wind as much as the next southern belle, and I really don’t mind
students watching the movie, but I have a real problem when teachers allow the
movie to stand in the place of real content.
They are merely passing along myths of the “Old South” instead of
correcting them. A formal academic view
of the Civil War should help students connect to the prevalent myths, but it
most certainly should correct them as well.
The movie can be shown, but the proper context should be present.
Gone
with the Wind, the movie, is Hollywood entertainment at
its very best with a few facts thrown in.
Gone with the Wind, the book,
by Margaret Mitchell, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and yes….there is a reason why I present the word
“fiction” in bold face.
There ARE historical inaccuracies with Gone with the Wind.
From the website Internet Movie Database we find
there are inaccuracies with dates. When
Mr. O’Hara announces the war is over because Lee surrendered the movie makes no
note that Lee’s surrender had no real effect on Georgia. In fact, Georgia state troops didn’t
surrender until the following month, and General Kirby Smith’s surrender in
Texas on May 26 is considered the end of the Civil War.
When Melanie is nursing a soldier he tells her he hasn’t
heard from his brother since the Battle of Bull Run. A Confederate soldier would never have
referred to the battle by that name. It
was known in the North as the Battle of Bull Run, but Southerners knew the
battle as The Battle of Manassas.
When Frank Kennedy is killed we assume he and other men
in Atlanta were attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting, but the group is never
identified. They are mysteriously absent yet were part of the true story.
Margaret Mitchell was dismayed at the scale of the Tara
and Twelve Oaks sets. She advised, “I
grieve to hear that Tara has columns. Of
course, it didn’t, and looked nice and ugly like Alex Stephens’ Liberty Hall in
Crawfordville, Georgia.”(See image here) Mitchell advised nothing like the movie
versions of Tara and Twelve Oaks were ever seen in Clayton County and advised
further, “When I think of the healthy, hardy, country and somewhat crude
civilization I depicted and then of the elegance that is to be presented, I
cannot help yelping with laughter…”
IMBd also advises the problems regarding the scene
commonly referred to as “the Burning of Atlanta.” It was not the actual burning of the city by
General Sherman in November, 1864.
Instead, the scene represents the night, two months earlier, when the
retreating Confederate army torched its ammunition dumps to keep the Union army
from capturing them.
Then there are the convicts Scarlett O’Hara leases from
the state to work at the sawmill.
Discussing this with students would provide an opportunity to connect
the end of slavery to the next unit of study regarding Reconstruction. If you go back and watch the scene the
convicts are depicted as white prisoners.
In truth this is very incorrect.
It is highly likely that the workforce Scarlett would obtain from the
convict lease program would have been black and the charges that had resulted
in their incarceration would be highly suspect today.
Convict leasing became a common practice following the
Civil War. In his book titled Going up the River: Travels in a Prison
Nation, Joseph T. Hallinan advises, “After the war, many Southern states
strapped for cash, leased their convicts to private businesses. Their best customers were those that offered
some of the worst work: railway
contractors, coal mines, and lumber and turpentine companies.”
I agree with
Hallinan…..unfortunately, the lease system largely resembled slavery. Hallinan advises, “Most Southern convicts
after the Civil War were black and under most lease systems employers virtually
owned the convicts they leased. They
were free to move them around the state unsupervised. The system led to horrible abuses, many inmates
were flogged, shackled or placed in the stocks. Inmates were often ill clothed and ill fed,
and many of them died. In Louisiana, as
many as 3000 inmates died under the convict lease system.”
I’m almost certain there is a reader out there wondering
the two words that signify indifference, so I’ll insert them here:
So what?
I can see your point.
They were prisoners. Murderers,
rapists, thieves, and were just getting what they deserved, right?
Have you ever heard of the Black Codes? Those were laws passed in the South
immediately following the war that controlled the labor and migration of newly
freed slaves. This
newspaper article advises most of the convicts were charged with minor
offenses such as jumping a freight train, adultery, or gambling. Many were merely deemed to be vagrants – a
person without a settled home or work, and when they couldn’t prove they were
employed the state sentenced them to many months of hard labor. At that point their contracts were sold to
private companies under the convict lease system.
In his book, Slavery
by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to
World War II, Douglas A. Blackmon advises The Tennessee Coal, Iron and
Railroad Company was one of the largest users of convict leasing for coal
mining labor in Alabama. Eventually TCI
was bought by U.S. Steel During their
first year oownership…..1908…..almost 60 convict workers died from
workplace-related accidents.
One of the U.S. Steel mines….the Pratt Mine in
Birmingham…..had over 1,000 men working the mine requiring them to dig and load
coal. Their daily quota was 8 tons or
they could expect to be whipped. They
were chained at night. The men suffered
from disease and when they died they were dumped in shallow graves. Most worked off their sentences at the rate
of $12.00 per month.
Blackmon’s website seen here
discusses the term “neoslavery” – a term that encompasses all of the various
ways black men across the South were sold into bondage or involuntary
servitude.
On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt
arrived at the White House from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African
American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James
Robinson, had been abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local
police would take no interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey,
struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. "They wont let me have
him. . . . He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to
you for your help." Like the vast majority of such pleas, her letter was
slipped into a small rectangular folder at the Department of Justice and tagged
with a reference number, in this case 12007. No further action was ever
recorded. Her letter lies today in the National Archives.
In
a Newsweek interview Blackmon was asked why the U.S. government allowed
“neoslavery” to continue even though it was investigated as early as 1903. Blackmon responded:
All the investigations that began in 1903 failed for various
reasons, but the main one was that it wasn't a crime in America to hold a
slave. The 13th amendment passed in 1865 made slavery unconstitutional. There
was no federal statute that made it a crime to hold a black person as a slave.
When the U.S. attorney general in the South began investigating slavery in 1903
and attempted to bring charges, they realized they did not have a clear federal
statue. So the prosecution was brought under other crimes that were similar but
in the end all the prosecution failed because the laws were not applicable and
no [Southern] jury would convict a white man for any crime against blacks.
Blackmon
was also asked the connection between the end of neslavery and the beginning of
World War II. He responded:
The end of neoslavery came as a direct result to the attack on
Pearl Harbor. When President Franklin Roosevelt convened his cabinet to discuss
retaliation, the main issue was propaganda and the Japanese ability to
effectively embarrass America for the treatment of blacks in the South.
Immediately President Roosevelt passed a congressional law criminalizing
lynching. Four days after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. attorney general ordered a
memorandum that instructed all federal prosecutors to aggressively prosecute
all cases of involuntary servitude.
Reading
the textbook, throwing a few worksheets around, and showing Gone with the Wind
does not teach students about the war. It merely marks time until the next unit
leaving students to own the myths they had when they walked into the
classroom. Find out what they already
know or THINK they know and move from there. Provide opportunities for students
to discover the truth.
PBS
will be airing a documentary based on Blackmon’s book on February 13th. The documentary is a mix of interviews with
historians, dramatic reenactments filmed in the Deep South, and emotional
testimony from descendants of both enslaved blacks and their captors….”
I strongly urge educators to watch.
The Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia is currently
showing an exhibit inspired by Douglas A. Blackmon’s research created by Robert
Claiborne Morris using mixed media such as portraits of the enslaved, maps of
the slave mines, newspaper articles and letters to the Department of
Justice. This
link takes you to more information regarding the exhibit.
T
he black and white photos with this post came from Douglas A. Blackmon's website.
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