Insofar that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has a glaring weakness -- aside from his uncanny resemblance to Boss Hogg -- it's his propensity for racial gaffes. In the last six months, Barbour has had to apologize for his praise of the Council of Conservative Citizens (the "uptown" Klan), crass racial "jokes," and overly rose-colored memories of his upbringing in the Jim Crow South.
That said, I take the Adam Serwer line on Barbour: not a racist, just a product of his time. And to his credit, he's worked to account for this flaw; when Mississippi's Sons of Confederate Veterans proposed a license plate commemorating Nathan Bedford Forrest (noted war criminal and founder of the Ku Klux Klan), Barbour announced his strong opposition, and most recently, he endorsed the consensus position on secession and the Civil War, namely, that it was the result of slavery:
But he has now made a forthright declaration about the events swirling around what some Southerners still call the War of Northern Aggression. “Slavery was the primary, central, cause of secession,” Barbour told me Friday. “The Civil War was necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery,” he continued. “Abolishing slavery was morally imperative and necessary, and it's regrettable that it took the Civil War to do it. But it did.”
Now, saying slavery was the cause of the South's Lost Cause hardly qualifies as breaking news — it sounds more like “olds.” But for a Republican governor of Mississippi to say what most Americans consider obvious truth is news. Big news.
Unlike Yglesias, I'm not sure that this is worthy of snark. As someone who grew up in a predominantly white, deeply conservative area of the South, I can say -- with a fair amount of certainty -- that "alternative" views of the Civil War are fairly common. From what I can remember of my elementary and middle school days, heavy emphasis was placed on the economic and "cultural" differences of the North and South -- arguments over tariffs, for instance -- with little attempt to place them in the context of slavery. In high school, more than a few of my peers referred to the conflict as the "War of Northern Aggression," and in college, I strained to convince friends that slavery was actually the root cause of the Civil War.
To place this in a broader context (and move away from anecdotes), it was 2000 before South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its state house, and both Georgia and Mississippi have state flags that incorporate the Confederate battle flag. Virginia celebrated "[Robert E.] Lee-[Stonewall] Jackson- [Martin Luther] King" day until 2000, and recently had to recall textbooks after historians found massive errors, including the erroneous claim that blacks fought freely for the Confederacy. Indeed, this time last year, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell faced a torrent of criticism after declaring April "Confederate History Month" and ignoring the central place of slavery in the formation of the Confederacy. And of course, we can't forget the Southerners who are "celebrating" the Civil War with a variety of neo-Confederate festivals.
I think non-Southerners have a tendency to underestimate the extent to which Confederate sympathy is a real and persistent phenomena in the contemporary South. Haley Barbour is the Republican governor of one of the most racially conservative states in the country, who came of age in the Jim Crow South. For him to unambiguously attribute Southern secession with the Civil War is kind of a big deal, and we should respect him for it.
