There’s a Question My Confederate Ancestors Taught Me To Ask

On the incredibly powerful pull of tribe over truth.

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Many readers may not know this, but today is a significant day in Civil War history. On April 26, 1865—17 days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee at Greensboro, North Carolina. The last major Confederate combatant command stacked its arms. 

I think of this day not merely because of its national historical significance but also because of its personal family importance. My ancestors fought for the Army of Tennessee. In fact, my ancestors marched across the very ground where my house sits and fought for their lives in the very town—Franklin, Tennessee—where I now live. Other ancestors fought for the Army of Mississippi. I’ve walked their battlefields at Shiloh and Vicksburg. 

And I must confess, the older I get, the more I’m haunted by their legacy.

I don’t mean that in a guilty way, as if I’m somehow responsible for the actions of men who took up arms for an unjust cause more than a century before I was born. Instead, I mean that I’ve often asked myself, “What would I have done?” 

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  1. AJV

    An idea for The Dispatch: include a daily/weekly list of the "Best of the Left," pointing out the best articles that articulate and defend leftist policies. That stuff is hard to come by, for me who reads mostly opinions of the right, but I assume good pieces exist. Finding and reading them would help avoid the "tribal" mindset you describe.

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    Jackson Latta

    I had ancestors fight in the Civil War. Likely on both sides. My great grandfather was on of Morgans Raiders. I don't agree with the notion of going off to fight someone else war. But I've always ascribed to the "Lee Paradox." If war comes to my own people, could I take up arms against them, even if there were morally wrong. The answer is no. Tribalism has taken on a negative connotation in the last few years. But, at least for myself, tribalism is a natural extension of allegiance. I live in Eastern Kentucky. About as deep into it as you can get. This place is my home, its people my family. My allegiance radiates out from my family, to my immediate neighbors, to eastern Kentucky, to the Region of Central Appalachia, to Kentucky, to the US, to the planet I suppose. Kentucky has an interesting place in Civil War history. Our allegiances were often boiled down to counties, and there was plenty of division even there. That hurts my soul to know that people here were fighting their own family and neighbors for a cause that was never really theres. I don't know what it's like for a lot of people living where they do. But to me there is some shared misery of living in dark and bloody ground that cant be taken lightly. I have a pretty large chip on my shoulder about the way Central Appalachia has been treated over the years. That slavery was an abhorrent practice should go without saying. But scrip was legal until 1938. In my lifetime we have been ground zero for the opioid epidemic and I have buried more friends than I can count. No one cared that Kermit West Virginia was prescribing more pain killers than the rest of the country. Because no one who doesn't live here, cares about these people. So we have too. I have too. Through thick and thin. Right or wrong. Thats tribalism man. It's often not particularly dignified. But at the end of the day, the dumbest Trumpian conspiracy theorist in my neighborhood is till worth more than anyone outside of a 100 mile concentric circle. I will be right, or I will be wrong with those around me.

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  3. KASHMAN

    David, For the past four years Michael Gerson, as an Evangelical Christian, has kept me sane and has been my defense against being "Gaslighted". As a Christian, an old white one at that, I have divorced myself from the term Evangelical because of its conflating politics with religion. This Faustian bargain with Trumpism has done incalculable damage to the gospel, excusing incompetence and cruelty for political access and Pyrrhic victories in the social culture wars. Thank you for speaking out and going against this tide. You have strengthened my faith in Christ and my hope for the future. Besides you and Gerson, there are other brave souls. I urge you to check out the Rev. Rob Schenck's new book "Costly Grace". It will encourage and strengthen you through the dark months that are inevitably coming until election day. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (Edmund Burke). Again, thank you and "The Dispatch" for giving "The French Press" a forum to reach guys like me.

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    Earl King

    As I said before, "judge least ye be judged". His finger wagging at white evangelicals is simply a symptom of TDS rather than the binary choice we faced as a nation. Tribal, indeed. I suspect there were a few southerners who thought slavery was wrong and an abomination. I also suspect that many thought it wrong but understood the South's economic survival depended on slavery therefore made the binary choice. I will point out that morality is usually a binary choice. To follow you better instincts or not too.
    Suggesting politics is a moral choice is mendacious. There are deeply held positions that abortion is moral on the ground of letting a women make her own personal and medical decisions. I think it's a crappy argument but people do think that way. If you feel abortion is murder you take the opposite position. Well then David might say abortion is not political issue...Ha, BS. Of course there are politics.
    If political choices were moral, Jimmy Carter would be king by now. Humans, people, citizens vote in their self interest. Asking to decide every political position on morality is stupid. If David made every political position a morality question he should be a rabid left wing progressive simply based on Jesuses word to "remember the poor". His position should be to have a more robust War on Poverty. Politics isn't moral, it's transactional. To think it otherwise simply leads to personal hypocrisy.

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  5. GS

    This French Press reminded me of this article from The Guardian. About a secretary in the Nazi Propaganda office. - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/15/brunhilde-pomsel-nazi-joseph-goebbels-propaganda-machine

    “Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have.” After the rise of the Nazi party, “the whole country was as if under a kind of a spell,” she insists. “I could open myself up to the accusations that I wasn’t interested in politics but the truth is, the idealism of youth might easily have led to you having your neck broken.”

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  6. Bob Metzger

    Again a great column. I spent my youth wandering the battlefields of that titanic struggle, wrongly called a Civil War. Once again David asks the tough questions. I don’t always agree with David or other Dispatch folks but subscribing here is my effort to expand and improve how I think of the great issues we all must face to preserve our Republic. I haven’t seen a Democratic candidate I could vote for in over 40 years but I insist on tying to see both sides as hard as that is on occasion.

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    Mark Strand

    I think there is a lot to consider in this piece, but I also think it fails to consider the main reason so many evangelicals have begun to behave as a group. They do not consider Trump in a vacuum - the consider him in light of the alternatives. Many evangelicals voted against Hillary Clinton. And for good reason. Imagine if she had had two Supreme Court picks. So much of this centers around the issue of human life. I am probably in the same age range as David French. When I started in the pro-life movement as a teen, I was the token Protestant. It was almost an entirely Catholic movement. But once the Protestants woke up in 1980 the movement changed and is still largely driven by something far more important than the legality of a procedure. The belief in God, as the creator of human life and the source of our rights, is a guiding philosophy that shapes far more than just our views on a single issue. But that philosophy is under withering attack from elites, the mainstream media, and an increasingly progressive Democratic party that has long abandoned President Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" attitude for marching in the streets with pink hats celebrating abortion right up to, and even past, the moment of birth. If this is a tribal response, it is one done out of the need for survival, because letting down our guard for even one election can have an irreversible impact on the future direction of our country. We realize that once you lose certain battles, there is no going back.

    It would be wonderful if elections were neat and tidy affairs and all the candidates were perfect representatives of their parties. But they aren't. In 2016, Evangelicals were all over the place in the primaries - and likely will be again in 2024. But once the choice is between a person who has defended our philosophy with his actions as president, and someone who would further ostracize us and our beliefs while solidifying in the courts and laws an opposite philosophy of life, the vast majority of Evangelicals will once again support Trump. If you are looking to get your Gospel lessons from political leaders, you want what has never, and should never be.

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      J.R.

      I think you'd be very surprised by the number of us that are still in the "safe, legal, and rare" camp. That's why this line of argument troubles me; I haven't seen much to suggest that Clinton, or any generic Democrat, would have focused on or expanded the right to an abortion in any transformational way (by which I mean making it more legally permissible). It's been my impression that when it comes to abortion the focus on Supreme Court judges has been much more about preserving (on the left) or rolling back (on the right) existing protections and precedent, not creating more liberal ones. Certainly, some small number of people want no regulation of abortion, but please don't believe that just because they get more coverage in the media, or make an useful foil for your political tribe, that they represent anything close to the majority position in the Democratic party.

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        Mark Strand

        Thanks for the response. It is not so much the issue of abortion itself, but the philosophy regarding the value of human life. I am very pro-life, but even I do not believe abortion will ever be banned. Instead, hearts must be changed. But the belief in human life and the idea of God-given rights inform a great many other issues not limited to the social ones. I would maintain the belief in the value of human life and of individual inalienable rights are the basis for Western civilization and constitutional democracy itself. Had Hillary Clinton appointed 150 lifetime tenured judges to the court you could be sure it would impact a great deal more than just state limitations on when and how an abortion can be attained.

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  8. harry lewis

    I believe that until the news media, the academy and the entertainment industry become objective and give accurate information that is available to everyone there's no chance for us to get out of our tribes. Therefore I am not optimistic There needs to be more people like David and others who are on both sides, but fair and clear in their thinking. And I wish they were "popular". I miss Charles Krauthammer!

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    WKDawson

    Thinking over your point "our virtue is often accidental. Our vices are stubborn" ... to some extent, the "accidental" aspect is that mechanization and the industrial revolution had taken hold in the northern states, so the machines, in a sense, began to do the work of slaves. It did, to some extent, require breaking the slave economy to get innovations to develop in farming (the "stubborn" aspect).

    It doesn't completely excuse the institution of slavery. The Levitical laws were built around ways to treat debt in a fairer way, and the world could have pursued a more Biblical means of commerce. Most societies and history have been about slave economies, that was part of the game of conquering territories, more comparatively cheap labor. ... and labor was needed to fuel those large ancient societies ... and it was not the kind of labor that most people would want to do. I wouldn't say that Levitical Laws were wonderful but they hammer on remembering that they were slaves in Egypt and made an honest attempt at writing laws that respected human dignity a little better. So we still have to face the fact that people took the easy way. For some of us at least, there is nothing like God's merciful teaching to hammer in our brains that we don't want to do such things to other people. As Jeremiah writes in Lamentations 3:27 "It is good for a man that he bear the yoke [i.e., His yoke] in his youth." That is the work of the refiner's fire.

    In all honesty, I could imagine that I might have said: "I don't like this, but what can I do?". I may not have been clever enough to imagine a different way and I may not have had the means to move to something else even if I were very clever. If my words were sincere, it would still mean that I had a duty to treat people with dignity and to call people out who didn't. It's all very easy to talk, but only by the grace of God would we ever find our way out of these kinds of rabbit holes we find ourselves in. The price of becoming more like Jesus is very high indeed, but also have victory because we gain a good heart through his yoke. We won't be left in the grave.

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    Trevor Reid

    I was a little scared when I saw the title, but this was an excellent article - With one exception. I have occasionally left Bible studies liking Christians less. One thing I had wanted to comment on from your previous Sunday article is the harshness that has infiltrated (some) Christian circles in recent years. Some thoughtfulness, but way too much vitriol. I won’t blame Trump, because he seems to be a symptom and a reinforcement rather than a incipient cause. It doesn’t matter really if the Christian group runs left or right. So much comment and conversation seems to be centered on the wrongness of the other side, whether it’s the “secularists” or the “fundies”. Grace, charity, and understanding can be benched. This seems to be the very phenomenon you describe here “when like-minded people gather, their views get more extreme. Our arguments reinforce one another to such an extent that the entire group will sometimes become more extreme than the most extreme person at the start of the deliberation.” Not sure the solution, but it kind of makes me sad.

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