The Source the Sons of Confederate Veterans Get Their “History” From

This is the third installment of our look at the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) Confederate Heritage Defense manual. Today we will look at the historical source used by the SCV to underpin its arguments in favor of the Confederacy. Read Part 1 on the SCV’s Confederate Heritage Defense Manual and Part 2 on the SCV’s claim that until the 1980s no one but Marxists had a problem with Confederate Flags, Statues, or “Dixie.”

The manual refers to the Civil War as the War for Southern Independence. Throughout its pages, the SCV manual describes the secession of the eleven Slave States from the United States as no different from the American Revolution.

The manual claims a special mantle of authority deriving from the Confederacy itself in its interpretation of all things Confederate. The manual acknowledges that:

There are numerous organizations which support the South and Southern heritage. Some advocate a new secession and a renewed effort toward independence. Others do political work. Still others are purely educational, trying to show people the true facts. Many people are in several organizations.

However, the SCV is the one “true legacy of the Confederate States of America.” According to the SCV manual:

The SCV is unique in this effort. First, the SCV is the true legacy of the Confederate States of America. The SCV are not only the actual descendants of the original Confederates, but the SCV was created by them in 1896 and, later, in 1927, the surviving veterans voted to give all records, materials, flags, symbols and remnants of the Confederate States of America to the SCV as their legitimate heirs. The SCV today is the only legitimate organization to interpret the efforts of their ancestors and the symbols they created.

With this special legacy comes responsibility. The manual says: “Because of this role, the SCV frequently finds itself in the public eye and particularly in the media.” The manual instructs “All who defend Confederate Veterans” to read what has become the groups historical catechism, A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States and the War of 1861 – 1865. Here is what the manual says:

It is vital that SCV members understand they represent their ancestors and have a duty to relate history as related by their ancestors. In his book, “A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States and the War of 1861 – 1865,” Captain Sam Ashe of North Carolina, succinctly lays out the Southern side of the
conflict. All who defend Confederate Veterans should have a reprint of his book. He was the official spokesman for the United Confederate Veterans Association (UCV).

The book is one that few people alive today outside of the SCV, League of the South, and related organizations have even heard of. You can find a free digital copy here. Its author, Captain Sam Ashe had been a young Confederate officer during the Civil War. He grew up on his family’s plantation in Rocky Point, North Carolina. After the war he ran as a Conservative for the state legislature and won on a platform opposing Reconstruction. He became an active force in the Democratic Party in the 1870s and was a newspaperman as well. In the 20th Century he was a leading Lost Cause polemicist, writing for the Confederate Veteran. Living until 1938 he was one of the last Confederate veterans to engage in the political debates around the CSA.

A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States and the War of 1861 – 1865 was published in 1935. Coming from a  leading spokesman for the “Confederate point of view,” it has become a source for the story of the Civil War that SCV members tell themselves. Let’s look at that story told by Ashe.

Considering that the SCV likes to insist that the Civil War was not about slavery, Ashe spends a lot of space in his book talking about slavery. He discusses the importance of slavery to the Southern economy, the involvement of the British and Northern shipping interests in the Colonial slave trade, and the growth of anti-slavery sentiment in the North from the Revolution onward. Of the 1840s and 1850s he writes of the North that “Year by year the anti-slavery sentiment increased.” He then describes the formation of anti-slavery parties in the North such as the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party as factors in promoting the ultimate secession of the Southern states. (p. 9)

A page later, he criticizes William Seward for saying that on slavery there was a “higher law” than the Constitution calling him to oppose slavery. He also describes anti-slavery books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe and “other writers” are described as helping to “inflame the North on the subject of slavery.” Ashe criticizes the Northern Christian societies because they “gladly accepted anything defamatory of the slaveholders.” (p. 10, 13)

Ashe writes that the goal of the anti-slavery movement was the instigation of a violent insurrection by the enslaved. He says that such an insurrection could not take place because slaves were happy! He writes about enslaved Black people as though they were pets, saying:

However, at the South, the relations between the African slaves and the white families with whom they had been raised were such that whatever efforts were made to stir up insurrections were fruitless. (p. 17)

Ashe next turns to the justification of the Southern states to secede from the Union. In a passage that, were it written today, the SCV would attack as Marxist Critical Race Theory, Ashe says that the United States Constitution protected slavery and that there would have been no United States had the Constitution not protected slavery!

In describing the reason the first seven Confederate States issued declarations of secession in 1860 and 1861, Ashe writes:

So basically, the book used as its source for its Heritage Defense manual by the SCV says that the creation of the Confederacy was the work of “slaveholders” in reaction to those seeking to limit or abolish slavery.

The next ten pages or so of Ashe’s book give arguments on why the secession of the Slave States was legal, how Lincoln violated his oath of office by not allowing them to secede, how the American Revolution was started for economic purposes, and other standard Lost Cause historiography. On page 27 Ashe takes up the issue of slavery again, saying that a main purpose of the new Republican Party was to spark slave insurrection. In Ashe’s view, the 1860 Republican Platform adopted at the party’s National Convention in Chicago placed Lincoln squarely in the anti-slavery camp. When news came that he was elected president in November of that year, South Carolina had to secede, in Ashe’s view, to preserve Black subordination. He writes:

Ashe faults Lincoln for placing his opposition to slavery above protecting slavery in order to restore the Union. He writes once again of South Carolina’s secession as a means to preserve slavery and Lincoln’s uncompromising stand against slavery and in favor of “the negro.” Here is how he sums it up on page 32:

When Lincoln issues his Emancipation Proclamation, Ashe characterizes it as a call for a “servile insurrection” of enslaved Blacks to massacre white women and children. Ashe writes that Abraham Lincoln was a dangerous man because of his opposition to slavery (p. 43)

Pages 55 to 65 of the book are spent mostly insulting and mocking Abraham Lincoln. Ashe makes the unfounded claim that at the end of 1864 Confederate president Jeff Davis was prepared to give up slavery in order for the Confederate states to rejoin the United States. This is of course nonsense, but it is propaganda that is widely believed by SCV members. On page 65 Ashe concludes his assessment of Lincoln by calling him “more evil than any man known to the world.” mind you, when this book came out in 1935, both Hitler and Stalin were world figures! Ashe also says that had the Civil War never happened, Emancipation “would have come in the natural course of events.” If that was true, why did South Carolina set the whole bloodbath in motion by seceding to protect slavery?

The book continues on for another ten pages, but most of its remaining verbiage is a scrapbook of self-justifying letters and speeches of Confederate leaders.

What are we to make of the Sons of Confederate Veterans using this odd mess as its authoritative source for understanding the Civil War? What to make of the fact that while the SCV says the Civil War was not fought over slavery, slavery is the single most discussed issue in Ashe’s book? What to make of Ashe’s contention that the war was brought on because of Northern Abolitionism and Lincoln’s allegedly intractable opposition to the spread of slavery?

I am often denounced on social media as “Anti-Southern” and told by my attackers to read one or another book from the “Confederate Point of View.” I often do and find the book dripping in racism and a pro-slavery ideology. Since my antagonists usually tell me to read these Confederate treatises to disabuse myself of my “modern” view of the cause of the war, I have to assume that they have never read the books they recommend.

I wonder if the same is true here. Is it possible that the SCV is recommending that all of its members obtain a copy of Ashe’s book, but that the authors of the Heritage Defense manual have never bothered to read it?

Oh my…

 

 

 

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