Two Gardens

I recently visited Athens, Georgia, with family members, where we walked through the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden on the University of Georgia campus and later along some of the pathways of  Georgia's State Botanical Garden. We had been to the State Botanical Garden previously, but there are always paths to walk that we haven't tread before. The Founders Memorial Garden is a much smaller garden, with concrete sidewalks and formally arranged garden areas; the larger State Botanical Garden has both formally arranged gardens and leaf litter trails that wander over ridges and under canopies of native and exotic trees. This time we stayed to the concrete paths and formally arranged areas.

Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden, Athens, GA

State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

pond in Garden Club Founders Garden, Athens, GA

partial view of larger pond at the State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

The weather was especially pleasant on the morning of our visit to the State Botanical Garden, as a cool front was blowing through, wafting away the clouds that had brought days of rain to the area. Tom and I noticed gardening techniques that we would like to transfer to our much more modest gardens (which are in great need of weeding and care at the end of a very wet summer).

Among the beautiful flowers and trees, the tiniest inhabitants carried on with their lives, largely unmolested and unnoticed.

This inchworm rolled up the loose threads of his silk thread as he climbed it to the canopy of a tree.

This spider hung suspended over an interpretive sign.

Every garden needs a yellow and black Argiope (garden spider).

This cricket was tucked head first between the stamens of this flower until I startled it from its bed.

Our walks in these gardens were among the highlights of the trip, as we lingered on benches and shared our reactions to the beauty of a natural world artfully arranged.  But the bitter sheen of history marbleizes these otherwise beautifully clear memories of our visits to these Southern gardens. As we were walking from the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden and exiting the UGA campus, we passed two historical markers, one commemorating the desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961, and the other memorializing the university's connection to the Confederacy.

Just steps away from each other, the signs attest to the bitter fruit of the South's "peculiar institution" and the pernicious effects of the hesitancy in acknowledging the culpability of one's ancestors in a bloody war. The second sign, as our daughter pointed out, was established in 1991, over one hundred and twenty five years after the end of the Civil War, and still the creators of this sign chose to designate that war as "the War for Southern Independence." These two signs represent the tension between two views of the South: graciousness and gentility, freedom loving and loyal; brutal and tribal, oppressive and paternalistic. So many fail to recognize the venom that remains in our failure to reconcile this dichotomy.

Some Consequences of the Confederacy

E. M.Armstrong, Sr.'s (partial) letter to Baker W. Armstrong, Dec. 20, 1884

Update below
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been immersed in reading letters written by Tom's great-great grandfather and his family, all of Virginia. Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., had been a prosperous merchant in Romney [now in West Virginia] before the Civil War. His father, William Armstrong, had immigrated to America from Ireland as a young boy, settled in what was then Virginia, and eventually represented Virginia in the U. S. Congress.

In 1861, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr.  was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861, a convention in which delegates were to discuss and to vote on whether or not Virginia would secede from the Union. He was among those who voted against seceding from the Union. Both representatives of Hampshire County, Virginia--Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and David Pugh--voted no. But the Ordinance of Secession eventually passed, and a majority of the citizens of Virginia ratified the vote.

We have no letters of the Armstrong family from before the Civil War or from during the Civil War, so I have little insight into why Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and several of his sons from his first marriage to Hannah Pancake, decided to fight for the Confederacy. One son, Isaac Armstrong, was mortally wounded in the battle of Gaines Mill; lingering for weeks, he finally succumbed to his wounds. I suspect, though, that like many Southerners who weren't connected to the plantation system, the Armstrongs joined the war out of loyalty to their state, to their region, to a sense of place. That doesn't make the decision right--for the Civil War was about slavery--but it makes the decision more understandable to those of us on the other side of Civil Rights.

After the war and now with children from a second marriage joining those from the first marriage, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., moved to Salem, Virginia. He was never again to be as prosperous as he had been before the War; his last years were spent farming and worrying how to support his family. He also was a board member of the Union Theological Seminary, then associated with Hampden-Sydney College, which today remains one of the few all-male liberal arts colleges.

The letters that Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., wrote his son Baker White Armstrong, the son who moved to Texas and who became my husband's great-grandfather, reveal the man to be kind, generous, loving, and very religious. That he fought for the Confederacy does not make him a bad man; it makes him a misguided man, misguided by the zeitgeist of the plantation economy:  the idea that some people are more equal than others, that some people deserve privileges bestowed on them by an accident of birth and the color of their skin, that some people, by that accident of birth and/or color of skin are providentially destined to be either leaders or laborers. He serves as a reminder of how good people can be persuaded to fight for bad causes--and of how religion can also be used as a tool for a bad cause.

In his letter of October 5, 1883, Edward wrote his son Baker:

I heard a splendid speech from Major Daniel last Monday. He had a full House, and many Re-Adjusters to hear him -- I think it highly probable that this country will gain a democratic majority this fall --Many of the old democrats who were enticed off by re-adjusterism have returned to the democratic fold, [and] others will follow. Mahoneism is a disgrace to our old state, and I can but hope there will be good [and] honest people enough found to throw off the party shackles and redeem the state at the Nov. elections.

The politics behind this letter are murky, the waters muddied by individual expectations and needs and the wider politics of a state that had lost the War. The politics have to do with railroads and debt and government services and the rights of poor whites and blacks freed by the defeat of the South. "Mahone" is William Mahone: he had been a slave owner, he had backed secession, he had been in charge of Virginians who massacred Union Colored Troops, and he moved up the ranks in the Confederate Army to major general. He was also a railroad tycoon, and after the Civil War, he fought to build railroads that would also provide profit for his railroad. Here is where E. M. Armstrong's personal desires probably intersected with politics, for Armstrong had bought land near Salem, hoping to profit from the Norfolk and Western Railroad's building yards, shops and a roundhouse in Salem. This didn't happen, and the family was reduced to what some call "genteel poverty." Perhaps William Mahone's financial success had something to do with E. M. Armstrong's failure to profit from his land acquisition.

During Reconstruction, the Virginia Constitution of 1870 provided suffrage for all men, black and white, over the age of 21, and also instituted state-funded public schools. Later, however, Conservatives used the state's war debt as a way to argue for cutting social services, and thus the access of blacks to education. William Mahone used this argument over debt vs. services as a way to gain political power. He created a biracial coalition of Conservatives and Republicans, and in 1881, was elected to the U. S. Senate. This coalition led by William Mahone was known as the "Readjusters," for its focus on "readusting" the state's war debt downward; this group of uneasy alliances also passed legislation that "abolish[ed] anti-black regulations, establish[ed] Virginia State University, increas[ed] financial support to public institutions, and charter[ed] labor unions." Mahone raised the ire of many Virginia voters, however, by caucusing with the Republicans, and his leadership tended to be autocratic.

A riot in Danville, Virginia, on November 3, 1883, gave Conservative Southern Democrats--the Democrats of the Old South-- the extra fuel they needed to ignite their political campaign to re-take state offices. Some reports describe a scuffle that broke out between some black men and white men after a meeting of prominent white men who were determined to defeat the government of the Readjusters. Other reports describe the riot as having started when black residents failed to give way to white residents on the sidewalks of the town. Whatever the specifics, the riot was obviously the result of the uneasy relationship between white and black citizens, and the repugnant idea of white supremacy. Several people were shot and killed, and the Conservative Democrats used this incident to incite "the fears of white voters."

William Mahone lost the 1884 election to another former Confederate officer, John W. Daniel, the man Edward Armstrong, Sr., had mentioned in his letter of October 1883, to  his son Baker. By the election of 1884, however, Baker W. Armstrong had moved to Bryan, Texas, to seek employment as a druggist with a drug store there. His brother Robert provides the news of the 1884 election, in a letter of November 10, 1884:

"Old Va" I am glad to say went Democratic on last Tuesday, [and] I cannot but hope that Mahone is "done for."

And in a letter written the 20th of December of that same year, E. M. Armstrong, Sr., tells his son Baker:

I wrote to Major Daniel requesting him to send you a copy of his Richmond jollification speech, and, if he could conveniently, his photo which I hope you will receive and appreciate.

And so the experiments in white and black coalition governments in the South came to an end, with the stoking of racial fears. Major John W. Daniel was also to serve as a delegate to Virginia's 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, the focus of which was to disfranchise African-Americans. Conservative Democrats had campaigned for the convention, touting the need for "electoral reform and better state government," code words then --and even now-- meant to obscure the marginalization of a minority group. But make no mistake--disfranchisement of African-Americans was the convention's main goal:

The main question for the delegates was how to eliminate the black vote without violating the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Eventually they proposed that under Virginia's new constitution, a man would be eligible to vote if he could satisfy one of the following three requirements: he could read or understand the state constitution; he had paid taxes on property worth at least $333; or he was either a U.S. or Confederate veteran or the son of a veteran. All three conditions were loopholes designed to protect white voters. Further narrowing the pool of possible voters, minimum requirements were set for age, residency, and literacy, and a poll tax requirement was also instituted.[ "Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902", on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

To make sure that blacks would not be able to vote on a constitution that would disfranchise them, "the Convention instead took the unusual step of proclaiming it the law of the commonwealth." ["Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902," on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

And so are good people manipulated and deceived through fear, personal interest, and a misguided sense of superiority.

Unfortunately, plantation politics continue today, and the myth of the Lost Cause obscures the horrors of slavery, of the debasement of one people to the enrichment of another.

Election "fraud" is still used as an excuse to make voting more restrictive even when the "fraud" is practically non-existent. [See "UFO Sightings are More Common than Voter Fraud," Hamed Aleaziz, Dave Gilson, and Jaeah Lee, Mother Jones, July/August 2012.]

And yesterday the politically-evenly split Virginia state senate pushed through a re-districting map while one of their Democratic colleagues (a civil rights veteran attending the presidential inauguration)  was absent and then afterward adjourned their session on Martin Luther King Day by paying tribute to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Perhaps there is a way to honor "good" men who fight for bad causes. This is not the way: publicly honoring a white man who fought for the enslavement of African-Americans on a holiday established to honor a black man who fought for the political and social freedom of African-Americans. This was also the day our first African-American president was inaugurated for his second term. Anyone who sees such actions as purely accidental and devoid of political motivation is willfully blind or ignorant. [For more juicy details, see: the blog of Blue Virginia, "Breaking: While Dems Distracted by Inauguration, Virgina Senate GOP Stages a Coup," in which Republican state senator Deeds is described as "rambling" on about Stonewall Jackson's love of peaches, lemons, and women.]

The poisonous fruit of the Confederacy continues to blossom. Let's hope that good men and good women are not deceived. The murky waters of politics require an alert and engaged citizenry.


UPDATE:
As one of the readers of this post has noted, although Edward McCarty Armstrong did vote against secession, he eventually did sign the ordinance to secede. The majority of the delegates elected to the convention were Unionists, and the debate'"raged on for months." You can read about that debate on the Encyclopedia Virginia website here: "Virginia Convention of 1861".

Writing for the Encyclopedia Virginia, Nelson D. Lankford describes how the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Fort's surrender and then Lincoln's proclamation "calling for all loyal states to send their militias to put down the Confederate rebellion" swayed many of these southern Unionists to change their vote. They had withstood months of prolonged debate and the fiery rhetoric of secessionists, but in the end:

[t]he tragedy of the Unionist majority in the convention was that, though its members loathed the thought of leaving the United States, in the end they could not countenance fighting against fellow white Southerners. [Lankford, Nelson D. "Virginia Convention of 1861." Encyclopedia Virginia. Ed. Brendan Wolfe. 23 Jan. 2013. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. 5 Apr. 2011 .]

See a copy of the Ordinance of 1861 here: Virginia's Ordinance of Secession.

Traveling with Hate from One Century to the Next

This afternoon I read an article on Slate titled "The Persistence of Hate," by Ray Fisman. The author describes a study done by Nico Voigtländer of UCLA and Joachim Voth of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain. The two academics set out to answer this question by looking at the roots of anti-semitism in Germany: "How persistent are cultural traits?" By comparing historical records, the authors discovered a correlation between the treatment of Jews in certain locales during the Black Plague with anti-semitism in the same locales in Nazi Germany:

When the Black Death arrived in Europe in 1348-50, it was often blamed on Jews poisoning wells. Many towns and cities (but not all) murdered their Jewish populations. Almost six hundred years later, after defeat in World War I, Germany saw a country-wide rise in anti-Semitism. This led to a wave of persecution, even before the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. We demonstrate that localities with a medieval history of pogroms showed markedly higher levels of anti-Semitism in the interwar period. Attacks on Jews were six times more likely in the 1920s in towns and cities where Jews had been burned in 1348-50; the Nazi Party’s share of the vote in 1928 – when it had a strong anti-Semitic focus – was 1.5 times higher than elsewhere.

The authors conclude that hatred was transmitted over centuries, toward a group of people who basically disappeared from Germany in the 1500s (after all the burning and torturing) and who did not return in numbers until the 1700s. You can evaluate the authors' methodology yourself at the following link and download the published paper: Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany," Nico Voigtländer and Joachim Voth, Social Science Research Network: Tomorrow's Research Today, May 27, 2011.

I have scanned the article but have not read it thoroughly, but the findings do not seem out of the realm of possibility to me. Hatred is transmitted from one generation to another, even when the receiving generation has had no personal contact with the persons against whom the hatred is directed.

Just hours after I read the discussion of the study on Slate, my son returned from the tutoring center where he is working part-time this summer. "Guess what question a fourth-grader asked me today," he said to me. "He asked me which side I was on in the Civil War."

A regular student at the tutoring center, this child evidently often tries to engage the tutors with off-the-wall questions not related to the subject in which he is being tutored. He had asked the same question of the woman who was tutoring him, and, not liking her answer--"on the side of the North"--he turned for vindication to my son, who was tutoring other students. When my son said that he was glad that the Union had won, the fourth grader asked him why. "Because slavery is evil," my son replied, trying to keep his answer short and to the point before getting the student back on track.

"But the Civil War wasn't about slavery; it was about state's rights," the kid replied. "Abraham Lincoln made it about slavery to stick it to the South." Then he added that he hated Abraham Lincoln and that it was a good thing that John Wilkes Booth shot him. And he asked my son why he didn't live in the North since he wasn't "for" the South--still fighting the Civil War in his little head.

Later, as my son and I were describing to my husband these two interlinking experiences--my reading the article on Slate and my son's experience with the young student--we discussed a myriad of responses, some a little smart-alecky:

• "You're right: it was about state's rights--about the rights of states to establish or to maintain slavery as an institution."
  
• "Which side was I on? I wasn't alive during that war. Surely I don't look that old."

But it really wasn't a funny story. Hate never is. .......

Update: This must be hate-Abraham-Lincoln week. I just read Andrew Leonard's post on Salon: "Was Abraham Lincoln a Jewish Pawn of the Rothschilds?" Only in this story, hatred of Abraham Lincoln is directly connected to hatred of Jews. It seems that there are conspiracists who believe that Abraham Lincoln started the Civil War because the Rothschilds thought it would be good for banking. It's true that after the Civil War--and in order to help pay for that horrible war--Lincoln reformed the banking system, establishing a national currency--and thus stabilizing banking. As Leonard points out, a similar narrative is being tossed around today toward another president who initiated major banking reform. Is there no exit from these stupid conspiracy cycles and hate transfusions?

A Real Horror Story

Today I opened up the free local newspaper, Dekalb Neighbor, and leafed through it before dropping it in the recycle bin in the kitchen. The Lifestyle section had  a special on locally "haunted" places, and one of the articles was about the Decatur cemetery:

In 1879, Capt. Edward Cox shot and killed Lt. Col. Robert Alston. The two Georgia statesmen and Civil War veterans were in a heated debate over the state's convict labor laws. Alston was trying to put an end to the practice of renting out prisoners for profit while Cox was becoming rich on the corrupt system. Cox was convicted of murder but later pardoned. Now Cox and Alston lie just a few feet apart in the Decatur Cemetery. Cox's grave is one of the stops on the new Decatur Ghost Tour, co-founded by psychic Boo Newell. Since beginning tours in September, Ms. Newell said visitors have reported feeling cold, touched, pulled and breathed on at the grave site. "Cox is still here trying to prove he's the man," Ms. Newell said. "He feels he never got the credit he deserves." (Dekalb Neighbor, 28 October 2009, B:1)

Ms. Newell may be a psychic, but I think she's misread the vibes at this grave site. More likely, Cox is unable to sleep well in his grave because of a guilty conscience. The convict labor laws were instrumental in re-enslaving black Americans after the Civil War, especially in the South. Draconian laws were passed, guaranteed to gather in African-American men who could not pay the fines the courts levied against them, and so their sentences, often for ridiculous non-criminal activities such as "changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight carts without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity--or loud talk--with white women," were lengthened (quote from Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name).

In this way, the white South continued to profit from the unwilling labor of African-Americans. The system was corrupt and brutal--and continued well into the twentieth century until World War II. As Blackmon writes in the introduction to his well-documented history of the re-enslavement of African-Americans,

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace--often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina--where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived. (Blackmon, p 7-8)

That people were well aware of the moral bankruptcy of forced convict labor is evidenced by the fact that Lt. Col. Alston, who fought in the Civil War, argued so strongly against its use that Captain Cox, profiting from just such a system, refused to hear those arguments, refused to countenance them so fiercely that he killed the man trying to convince him. That the whole society was complicit in the brutal system is illustrated by how long it lasted and by how that society viewed the man who murdered Lt. Col. Alston: Cox was pardoned. In fact, years later, when Lt. Col. Alston's widow died, The New York Times published a derisively dismissive obituary from Atlanta, GA., that not-so-subtly supported the murderous Captain Cox:

DEATH OF MRS. ROBERT A. ALSTON.

ATLANTA, Ga., Sept. 5--Mrs. Robert A. Alston died in Decatur to-night at 6  o'clock. She was the widow of the late Col. Robert A. Alston, who was murdered some years ago in the executive office by Capt. Edward Cox. The shock of her husband's death followed Mrs. Alston through life. Col. Alston was a liberal liver, and on his death left nothing, so that his widow's life has been much trouble. Capt. Cox, who was pardoned by Gov. Stephens, now occupies an official position here. (published September 6, 1884, from The New York Times archives)

No, I don't think that Capt. Cox is still trying to show "he's the man." More probably, he rests badly in his grave because he profited from murdering a man who was in the moral right, the man that the writer of that obituary sneered as being a "liberal liver."

And so here, I praise Captain Robert A. Alston, despite whatever faults he might have had personally, a man who tried to do what was morally right and was killed for it. The re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South after the Civil War is a real horror story that all Southerners should confront--or else sleep fitfully in their graves.