The Civil War, Then and Now

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McLeod Plantation, Charleston, South Carolina

McLeod Plantation was another one of Joan's bucket list rebellion items, but it fit perfectly with the Fort Sumter National Monument. So I'm not complaining at all - I'll explain.

We took an hour long guided tour through the plantation escorted by a slight wisp of a young woman who had perfected a very powerful and moving story explaining a lot of what we could see with history that wasn't at all obvious. She had an excellent command of the raw data, able to recite the plantation production statistics of 1860 giving the talk a foundation of economic reality. At the same time, she was able to weave in the personal stories of people who had lived on the plantation over the course of nearly 150 years. She has even spent time in Sierra Leone, looking at the origins of these slaves. Obviously, she is a young woman committed to her job and does it very well. The end result was a very effective narrative that breathed life into the physical structures. If you go to tour McCleod, hope that Leah is your tour guide!

One of the first things she tells you is that the 'Main House' on the plantation, where the tour starts isn't even real. Yes it looks like Tara from Gone With the Wind, but that portico and the two story columns were actually added in the mid-twentieth century explicitly as a tourist attraction precisely because tourists expected the 'main house' to look like that. And, even more artificial, the columns were added to the back door, not the front, because that was the side where the local government built the road and it was expected that the house would be first viewed from visitors coming in on that side. The original building opened out looking out on a marsh because the sea was the original way that visitors would arrive. The original McLeod home was a much more modest structure.

Thankfully, the real story here has very little to do with the 'main house' and Leah did an excellent job of steering us to what was really important about the place - the slaves, not the masters. One of the statistics she used was the fact that the McLeods numbered about five while they owned, at a high point, nearly 100 slaves. So you had five white folks living in the main house (with a few black house slaves to cook and babysit), while nearly 100 black folk lived in cramped slave housing a few yards away.

Another chart on an interpretive sign was highly instructive. It showed the relative proportion of free whites to black slaves in South Carolina over time. In 1860, blacks outnumbered whites by overwhelming margins. One can imagine the insecurity whites must have felt every single night when they went to bed about what might happen if they lost their control! Destroying families, whipping slaves for little or no reason, making sure they never learned to read or write, raping women - all of these were techniques to ensure the blacks kept in their place and never achieved the power their sheer numbers deserved.

Mostly, the interpretations offered made little effort to shield the ugliness of slavery. One sign, inside the main house, offered up a ten word clause all, apparently, to avoid using the word 'rape'. And that kind of pissed me off - it should be called what it really is! But that was inside the main house which, as Leah explained, is sort of artificial anyway - it is the photo-opp spot. Leah's treatment of the subject, though, minced no words and clearly made little attempt to defend the McCleods.

I wish I could say that history had done as well. I finished a book 'The Civil War Remembered' put out by the Park Service that incorporated a series of essays by prominent historians. There was one essay about reconstruction that brought out facts I either didn't learn when I was in school, or that I have forgotten. With the Emancipation Proclamation, followed up by its implementation by the military in the few years after the war, slaves were promised '40 acres and a mule' to be parceled from the former slave holders land. That happened at McLeod and former slaves returned to get their chunk of the plantation on which they had lived and toiled as property. That went on for a year or two.

But Lincoln was assassinated. Now when Lincoln got started with this whole thing in the 1850s, he wasn't necessarily an abolitionist. He was opposed to slavery, but he was interested more in keeping it from spreading westward. He recognized how critical the institution of slavery was to the economic interests of the South but believed it might wither of its own accord if it wasn't allowed to spread to new states. Southerners recognized that too and, when Lincoln was elected saw the writing on the wall, which is why the secession, Fort Sumter, etc.

It was only as the positions solidified and the war proved more difficult than anyone expected, that Lincoln became committed to abolishing slavery. So he issued the proclamation, and eventually, won the war. But that commitment to the replacement of slavery with a new economic system pretty much died with Lincoln.

The backslide began fairly quickly because Johnson was pretty much a spineless idiot easily manipulated by the ruling classes. And so the '40 acres and a mule' was eventually rescinded, plantation lands were actually returned to the families of the plantation owners, and the free slaves were literally thrown out of their land and the homes and farms they had built.

In the place of being landowners of their own right, they were offered 'labor contracts' whereby they could remain in their homes as long as they worked for the 'true landowners' (the previous plantation owners.). These 'labor contracts' gave away most of the liberties they thought they had acquired in the civil war victory, essentially returning them to slave status. The local governments even passed 'vagrancy laws' which defined anyone without a labor contract as a vagrant with jail as punishment, thereby forcing them to accept contracts that were never written with their interests in mind. Leah recounted how multiple former slaves, elevated by the prospect of farming their own land and living in their own homes, were, within just a couple of years, back at work in the gardens and fields of their former masters. That white power over the blacks was consolidated over the next century as Jim Crow and then 'separate but equal' segregation, taking on different flavors, but always with the same result - preservation of the white power structure. I was brought to tears as Leah described how hopes were raised and then dashed so severely.

The more things change the more they stay the same. I can't help but compare this entire civil war history with what is going on right now in contemporary politics. Just as in Reconstruction, what is happening now with Trump and his minions is just another desperate attempt to remain in power and to keep their economic interests intact. One could argue that beginning with Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s there was a movement to alter the power structure, to prop up the lower and middle classes, and restore some income equity. The federal government was an agent of that change.

Moneyed interests weren't, and aren't, happy about that and, especially after our first black president, began a concerted effort to stop the shift in assets. 'States Rights' became a battle cry much in the same way it was used in the Civil War. It isn't so much that people want states to have more power. Rather they don't want the Federal government to have so much power because it is more difficult to control it than it is the states. As national government has progressively sought to redistribute wealth from the 'haves' to the 'have-nots', wealthy folks are looking for ways to reduce that power - no better way than to argue, as they did 150 years ago, 'states rights'. Racial politics are also resurrected as a tool to mostly distract people from what is going on and to rally supporters. Of course, southern, and other marginal whites are supporting Trump while he proposes a tax plan that significantly reduces taxes on the wealthy!

And so we are back to confirming my observation of 40 years ago - that the Civil War is still being fought. What I didn't know then, but understand better now, is that this isn't a war between black and white, nor even North and South. This is pure and simple, a war between the classes - the rich want to continue building massive houses on piers out in the middle of rivers, and they don't care what the rest of us have to give up to make that happen.(17.1.54)

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Photos

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The Real McLeod Plantation - Slave Houses

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The Original Kitchen and Cellar

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Freed Slaves Also Occupied These Homes

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The 'Main House' with the Hollywood Porch

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The 'Tara" View

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Listening to Leah Talk About Plantation Life

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One Big Old Oak Tree