The Original Culture War

Rewriting the history of the Civil War

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, by H.W. Crocker III, Regnery, 2008. $20, 370 pg.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, part of the conservative Politically Incorrect Guide (P.I.G.) series of books, attempts to retell the history of the Civil War in a manner very different from the presentation in most American schools. The book’s author, H. W. Crocker, argues that the Confederacy was not a “blot on American history.” He contends that the South epitomized the Founders’ vision of a free American people, a people championing Christianity, states’ rights, and conservatism. The book includes sections on the causes of the war, secession, a military history of the war, and eventually a brief “What if?” scenario on what the world may have looked like if the South had won. He has a pronounced, and declared pro-Southern bias.
The author’s insistence that the South was a “conservative” part of the nation, however, stands out. Crocker intentionally updates the book with anachronisms to try to recast the War Between the States in the mold of more recent squabbles between red and blue states. The author tries to open a new front in the culture war by recasting history in a way to suggest that the South, and thus American conservatism, was right.
Johnny Reb: The All-American Hero?
The author focuses, foremost, on the history of the Civil War through the individuals who led the Union and the Confederacy. Crocker portrays the leading Southerners in starkly anachronistic terms: buzzwords such as conservative, paleo-libertarian and others are used to associate these men with the talking points of right-wing commentators. Many of these figures come off as heroic archetypes of the modern conservative: Jefferson Davis is described as a “pillar of…Christian stoicism and political conservatism.” Crocker depicts Robert E. Lee as a flawless archetype of the true Christian conservative man. Most of these figures are ascribed what might be called progressive views: they treated their enemies, and their slaves, humanely, and their defense of states’ rights was in line with the Framers’ view of the Constitution.
The Union leaders receive less glowing treatment. Crocker attempts to deconstruct the “myths” of the Union generals. He depicts what he claims was the brutal and flawed nature of many of the Union generals, from the harshness with which General George Thomas treated Southerners, even though he was one, to the irreligiosity of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Such men are contrasted with the moral, upright, and religious Southern generals. Crocker seeks to show that the South had the moral high ground in the war as the fairer and more progressive side.
Red States: The New Dixie?
Furthermore, Crocker attempts to generalize these descriptions to the whole of the North and South. He portrays the Old South’s planter aristocracy and independent farmers as paragons of the “real” America: they sought “preservation of an existing system,” the “conservation of enjoyment,” and untainted Christianity. The North, in contrast, is portrayed as hysterical and hypocritical, especially over the issue of slavery. Northerners hyperbolize its horrors and seek to end slavery now in order to create an “all-white future” in the United States. The South, however, recognizes the evil of slavery and believes that it will fade away peacefully to a world in which black and white can live harmoniously.
In the book, the South was the righteous force in the Civil War. Crocker uses this line of reasoning to strengthen the arguments of the conservative movement, and thus the Republican Party, in the culture war. The Old South was traditional and Christian, upholding social conservatism, the family, and the free market, just as the Founders had intended. The North, and thus the Democratic Party today, is completely antithetical to that vision. The strategy, however, is both flawed and ironic. Much of the author’s support comes from cherry-picked research and one-sided judgments of figures. The result represents a new extreme in flogging the apparently dead horse of the culture wars. It is ironic, as well, that Republicans now champion the legacy of the South. The Republican Party, until recently, championed a strong, united federal government for decades against the divisive, racist politics of the Southern Democrats. Now strong in the South, the Republicans seem to have inherited the legacy of divisiveness that came from the Civil War.