By Scott Graber
It is Tuesday, and the temperature has ascended into the 90s. This morning we worked in the yard — mostly pulling moss out of our oaks — but that work became unbearable by 11. This afternoon, I retreated indoors, re-reading an Aug. 4 opinion piece by George Will.
I have been drawn to George Will for many years — often disagreeing with his thinking — but always envious of his style. Will’s current piece centers on another writer, David Reynolds, who has just published a book titled “Two Ships.”
The White Lion arrived in Jamestown in 1619; the Mayflower arrived in 1620. The Mayflower arrived with Puritans who were fleeing “monarchial absolutism;” the White Lion came into Jamestown with slaves. It is David Reynolds’ proposition that these ships “incubated two ultimately incompatible American futures.”
“Incubated two ultimately incompatible American futures.”
Who writes like that anymore?
But Will is quick to point out that this simplistic, binary thinking “always obscured and distorted much.”
In the beginning New England embraced the notion that — in addition to slaves — the White Lion also brought “the Church of England rituals and dissolute living associated with leisure, gambling, lavish entertaining, dueling and other attributes of a society obsessed with feudal notions of chivalry and ‘honor.’”
The Southern colonies, for their part, believed the Puritan passengers, and their descendants, persecuted heretics, conducted witch trials and celebrated Oliver Cromwell’s beheading of King Charles I.
Reynolds says that these convenient characterizations disappeared around 1776 — just in time for the colonies to defeat the British — but then they came back with the North now mixing-in antislavery sentiments with it’s previous allegations. The Southerners, according to Reynolds, then remembered that the Mayflower was freighted with fanatics, including some abolitionists, and returned fire on their Northern kinsmen.
These regional characterizations — much of it repeated and refined in newspapers published in Charleston and Boston — eventually led to a small group of Citadel cadets banging away at a supply ship that was trying to resupply Fort Sumter in January 1861. (The Star of the West was not armed and its captain was able to evade the cannon balls lobbed by the newly minted cadet artillerists.)
Notwithstanding four years of desperate fighting, these cadets and many other Southern soldiers were “ground down by the North’s material strength.
“There is much to be said for materialism undergirding a noble cause,” saith George Will.
Then, of course, there was the disgrace and humiliation of complete defeat and years of trying to recapture some modicum of self-respect. Into this void comes Douglas Southall Freeman and his Pulitzer Prize-winning four volume biography of Robert E. Lee.
Southall’s accounts of Manassas, Fredericksburg and Trevilian Station gave some measure of self-respect to the defeated Southern veterans. Freeman followed up with “Lee’s Lieutenants” that was a detailed, first-person account (by Northern and Southern participants) of what what went down on the battlefield.
Freeman and other “Lost Cause” writers have taken numerous hits over the years because they did not talk about slavery — the fact that Robert E. Lee had slaves. For the most part Freeman did not write about the moral issues that ran through the besieged brains of DH Hill, Wade Hampton or the cadet company that rode with Hampton. Freeman just stuck with maneuvers, munitions and overnight marches that turned the Federal flank at Chancellorsville.
The great mystery of that tragic war is how those Scots-Irish farm boys fought so hard, with so little, keeping the Northern industrial giant at bay for so long.
There is, of course, no mystery about the evils of slavery. Those once-debated details are now fully documented in museums in downtown Montgomery, Birmingham and Charleston. There is no mystery about the tragedy of Reconstruction that rolled-back the voting, education and bus-riding rights secured by African Americans in the years that followed Appomattox. And there is no mystery that the cancer of racism is still present in the body politic.
But hold on.
The Supreme Court (see Louisiana v. Calais) and Chief Justice John Roberts seem to have some real doubts that any version of the Voting Rights Act is still necessary.
Recently Margaret Talbot wrote in the Aug. 18 New Yorker — “Delusions of John Roberts” — that “Roberts writing about race suggests that America has fully formed itself into a meritocracy that rewards the strivers among us …”
And so, finally, we come back to the White Lion and the Mayflower, their cargo, the carnage that followed, asking ourselves if the pathogen brought ashore in Jamestown is truly vanquished?
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.