November 9, 2010 — James Loewen is co-editor of the recently published “Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.” Remapping Debate sat down with him to discuss the importance of bringing back from obscurity the primary source documents that make clear the racism, brutality, and disloyalty of the Confederacy, as well as the continuing lure of white supremacist ideology. According to Loewen, straightforward and unromanticized accounts of Confederate ideology remain, in many quarters, the historical truth that dare not speak its name. Part 1 of the interview is below. Subequent parts are on the pages that follow.
Part 2 of Remapping Debate’s interview with James Loewen, who is also the author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” picks up with a discussion of the South’s disingenuous claim in the 1840s that it was not insisting on extending slavery everywhere in the United States.
Remapping Debate continues its interview with James Loewen, who is also the author of “Sundown Towns,” a book that describes the thousands of towns that, between 1890 and 1968, systematically excluded African-Americans from living within their borders. Part 3 of the interview begins with the February 1861 pro-secession appeal by a Georgia Supreme Court judge to the Virginia State Convention. The judge, Henry Benning, warned that the consequence of abolition would be that “our men will all be exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds…and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.”
Part 4 of the interview begins with Professor Loewen describing 1890 — the scarcely remembered post-Reconstruction low point for African-Americans — as a time when lawful federal authority was being brazenly violated at the state level.
The concluding portion of Remapping Debate’s interview with James Loewen begins with a discussion of a popular modern-day flag bearing the legend that if the South had won, “we’d have no problems now.” Remapping Debate asks Loewen: has the South, in some respects, won the Civil War?