A LITTLE HISTORY FOR RICH LOWRY.

Funny, isn't it, this update on Rich Lowry's latest Confederate flag whine at National Review:

Further to that point: The fact is that if anyone banging on about the Confederacy at the moment on Twitter were born in the 1840s in the South, outside of a few select areas, they, too, would have fought for the Confederacy. (UPDATE: It should go without saying that this isn’t true of blacks.) That should lend a measure of modesty to this debate.

Here's some extra cream for the jest: You may recall I've been reading The Confederate States of America 1861-1965 by University of Georgia professor E. Merton Coulter, who was very much a man of his time and place (that is, per Wikipedia, a white supremacist). His research generally seems sound, but there are places where you can really see where the professor's head is at, and his chapter on "Agriculture, Subsistence, and Negroes" is in this regard a corker.

We hear, for example, about how cheerful the slaves were during the war: "An Alabama editor in recording his observations of Christmas time wrote of the 'sleek fat Dinahs and plump jowled Sambos' who had paraded the streets of Selma, and he contrasted them with the 'hollow-eyed, care-worm faces' of the whites, adding 'we seldom see a merry white man except when he is drunk.'" That statement is in itself a ripe object for contemplation.

Coulter also tells us that some slaves took advantage of the war to join the other side -- "invasions were bound to upset the slaves and lead many of them to follow after the armies... many 'willing wenches' submitted to the Federal soldiers and thereby increased the mullato population of the South..." -- and some even joined the Union Army but "being poorly trained, most of them were not conspicuous either for bravery or skillful fighting." (Yes, I know, you saw Glory, but Coulter presumably heard this from some old rebel and he should know.)

But here's the part that may interest Lowry: toward the end of the war, the South in desperation floated the idea of black Confederate troops --

It was contended that slaves could be easily disciplined and would make good soldiers, that slave soldiers would ennoble still further the institution of slavery and lighten its rigors after the war that without more soldiers the war might be lost, and that as slaves had fought for American independence during the Revolution they should now help gain Southern independence...

But, naturally, opposition to making slaves into soldiers was deeply embedded in Southerners. It seemed bizarre and grotesque and wholly at variance with the very essence and character of Southern civilization. How could white people ever look a Negro in the face again, knowing that they owed their very existence to their own slaves? It would be the end of slavery and the beginning of social equality and miscegnation. Senator Wigfall said he "wanted to live in no country in which the man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal." It would bring a blush to the cheeks of the old soldiers to have to tell their children and grandchildren that the Negroes had won independence for the Southerners. Once in his lifetime Howell Cobb was to find himself in agreement with Governor Brown on a public question, when both held that arming the slaves would be a negation of everything for which the South was fighting.

So that was why they didn't hand rifles to their own slaves and tell them to go fight the people who wanted to free them -- not because they were scared, but because it was an insult to their heh'tage, suh! I guess if we can forgive Coulter for making a distinction between "Negroes" and "Southerners," we can forgive Lowry.