I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories. This lie of the civil war is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” declared Mississippi as it left the union, “the greatest material interest in the world.”Ĭoates with his son, Samori, in the summer of 2013.īut American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honour and élan. But we can do better and find the bandit confessing his crime. The first shot of the civil war was fired in South Carolina, where our bodies constituted the majority of human bodies in the state. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi river valley and they made their riches off our stolen bodies.
But robbery is what this is, what it always was.Īt the onset of the civil war, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies – cotton – was America’s primary export. But even then I knew that must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the grey wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking manoeuvres, hardtack, smooth-bore rifles, grapeshot, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention and design had been marshalled to achieve. I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee.
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