‘Yankee scum’: Confederates still contesting U.S. Civil War, 150 years later

PETERSBURG, Va. – A Confederate sympathizer wanders through a graveyard filled with former soldiers, dismayed by the damage from northern artillery that left cracked and cratered tombstones.

“Yankee scum,” says Frank Earnest, a Confederate organization’s department commander.

“They leave out this part of the story.”

This walk through Blandford Cemetery did not occur 150 years ago on April 9, 1865 — the official end of the American Civil War.

It occurred last week.

And much like the lingering cracks in those old tombstones, there are everlasting signs of that north-versus-south, nation-tearing struggle that killed over 600,000 Americans.

The fissures run deeper than present-day north-south differences: in politics, demographics and religious affiliation.

They go back 15 decades. Some descendents of the old south are nursing a well-aged beef against their old Yankee foes. They contest the popular view of that war as a good-versus-evil struggle where slavery was the central issue, and their ancestors were firing muskets on the wrong side of history.

They even disagree on the war’s name.

To them, it was the War For Southern Independence. It went like this: the agricultural south was squeezed by tariffs on foreign goods that benefited northern manufacturers; the rift deepened with political differences, among them the role of slavery in the western territories; southern states declared independence, as was their legal right; and they were squashed by a tyrannical president who invaded for economic reasons, cynically re-branded his war as a human-rights struggle, and wound up with an undeserved spot on the $5 bill and status as national hero.

“The shooting stopped — but the war continues,” said John Sawyer, a retired foreman who, like Earnest, belongs to the group Sons of Confederate Veterans, which claims 30,000 members.

“I guess it will continue as long as you have people who hate southerners, and southerners who hate Yankees.”

It’s clearly not the mainstream view.

But the U.S. Supreme Court is currently hearing a case about whether to make Texas the 10th state to allow vanity license plates with the stars-and-bars Confederate flag, and a recent Pew Research survey said 36 per cent of Americans deem it appropriate for modern-day public officials to praise Confederate leaders.

There are regional differences. Sawyer almost got expelled from his Maryland high school for voicing pro-southern views, while Earnest’s 1960s Virginia high-school textbook referred to the U.S. Army as the enemy.

In a Virginia forest last week, Confederate flags fluttered.

A group of about 100 people arrived in cars, decorated in red-blue license plates and bumper stickers, to pay tribute at the site where their beloved general, A.P. Hill, died in a late-war battle, 150 years ago.

Women dressed in black, and men wore period garb or biker jackers with the crest “Sic semper tyrannus” — a Virginia state motto, best known elsewhere as the words John Wilkes Booth shouted upon shooting Abraham Lincoln.

Earnest wore a southern cavalry uniform.

He met his wife Billie through the cause. His email address and phone number contain war references. Her minivan has Gen. Robert E. Lee on the license plate. They expect to be buried in separate cemeteries, near their respective Confederate ancestors.

He scolded a reporter for comparing the Confederate flag to the American one: “Don’t say American. We’re Americans, too.”

To him, it’s the U.S. always betraying American principles, like limited government. The founding fathers would be aghast at a government that regulates lightbulbs and toilet flows, he says. However, he’s got a track-record of dedication to the U.S. — having served 20 years in the Navy, before becoming an electrical contractor.

One thing missing in the forest ceremony: visible minorities. There weren’t any. But Earnest said the group has some black members and would gladly welcome more.

He said it would instantly expel anyone spewing racist slogans. There’s one group Sawyer dislikes: “I’m prejudiced against Yankees.”

What about the moral abomination of slavery? Earnest said it disappeared throughout the Americas, and would have disappeared here, too. A financial settlement between north and south could have achieved that more peacefully than Lincoln’s invasion — “in a practical way.”

There’s something people must understand about southerners’ psyche, he said: They hate being told what to do. The best way to get southerners to do something, like on civil rights, is the soft sell.

He resents the northern sense of moral superiority.

It was the confederacy that had a Jewish secretary of state, he said. But he said the Yankees bury those bits of southern history: they even stole the Thanksgiving holiday, created in Virginia but now credited to those Plymouth Pilgrims.

He teared up during a barbecue lunch. What got him choked up was a painting of a battle where southern boys and old men fought the mighty union army.

“We’re treated as a defeated, conquered nation — subjugated, maligned, ridiculed,” he said.

“Under those conditions, absolutely, I wish we had won and we were the Confederate States of America.”