Response To H. K. Edgerton Torin Steele Summary

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Short Essay No. 7 Responses to H.K. Edgerton Torin Steele The numerous historical and personal factors that might drive an African American man to spend his golden years becoming a political champion for the modern Lost Cause mythology is unclear and difficult to ascertain based on the rarity of this seemingly self-defeating attitude. Nonetheless, one H.K. Edgerton seems to have taken up this mantle: fighting a culture war against what he deems to be a long history of northern propaganda which has dishonestly portrayed the Confederate States of America as not being particularly kind in its treatment of those of African descent. Perish the thought of the. According to Edgerton’s history, not only did the Confederacy respect the Black man as …show more content…

In this writing, I will justify my incredulity with Edgerton’s fiction and attempt to posit the true role the African American played in the Confederate war effort. Part 1: The Myth. The moment the Confederacy fell and the ego of the white supremacist portions of the South received the blow that was a Union victory and the following full emancipation, there was a massive scramble to find a way to compensate for the decades of virulent race science and justifications for the subjugation of the African American. In the early postbellum years, the claim of slavery’s benevolence persisted as the dominant justification. Yet as Reconstruction saw its rise and subsequent crash, and Jim Crow found its foothold in the ashes, this worldview needed to evolve. The subtext of racial inferiority never left, but it needed to be veiled to avoid the optical damage that came with the territory of what the Lost Cause truly believed. The Lost Cause needed evidence of African American loyalty to the Confederacy to hold up the fantasy that the war was not fought over the subjugation of a race, but rather economic …show more content…

This order functionally permitted Confederate troops who captured Black Union Soldiers to never give quarter to their prisoners. As the war came to an end, and the Confederacy army ran so low on manpower, the proposal of emancipating slaves to bolster their ranks began to be genuinely considered by the Rebel higher-ups. On January 22nd, 1864, the Confederate Congress issued a reminder to the people of the nation concerning Slavery’s importance in their way of life; “Subjugation involves everything that the torturing malice and devilish ingenuity of our foes can suggest – the destruction of our nationality, the equalization of whites and blacks, the obliteration of State lines, degradation to colonial vassalage, and the reduction of many of our citizens to dreary, hopeless, remediless bondage.” (2) It was the official position of the Confederate government that to enact an emancipation order in any way, shape, or form might as well be surrendering to the

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