San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
WHAT IS HERITAGE IF NOT TRUTH TO HISTORY?
A few years ago, I attended a meeting of the San Antonio chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization I am eligible to belong to (though I don’t) through an ancestor’s service to the Confederacy, an ancestor who would later be killed by Wild Bill Hickok.
I was the only one at the meeting who would also be eligible to join the Sons of Slaves Who
Would Remain Slaves had the Confederates Won, if such an organization existed.
Despite this, everyone was wonderful and, at meeting’s end, a very nice woman approached me and said, almost apologetically, “For these guys, it’s about heritage.”
She was speaking not just about the local SCV chapter but of all the Confederacy’s devotees. I told her I understood.
How could I not, when, more than any other word, “heritage” is used to defend the Confederacy, deny the Civil War was fought over slavery and justify Confederate monuments?
These monuments are now coming down for the same reason they went up: They represent the degradation of black lives. They glorify the defense of an institution in which the value of black bodies wasn’t in their shared humanity with whites but in their labor and what they could be sold for on the auction block.
In recent speeches, President Donald Trump has said bringing down Confederate monuments is an assault on “our heritage.”
Some see their heritage in a lost cause on a battlefield between 1860 and 1865.
Others see their heritage in a bill of sale dated Sept. 1, 1837.
Written out by Nathaniel Hunt Greer, it reads, in part, “have this day bargained, sold and delivered unto Philip Coe a certain Negro girl by the name of Louisa for the sum of eight hundred dollars, the payment of which is hereby acknowledged and the right and title of said Negro.”
Philip Haddox Coe was my great-great-great-grandfather. That “certain Negro girl by the name of Louisa” was my greatgreat-great-grandmother. This was a heritage that was “bargained” and “delivered.”
For $800, my white greatgreat-great-grandfather purchased “the right and title” to own and rape my black greatgreat-great-grandmother. She would give birth to three of his children in Gonzales. The middle child was Dan, my great-greatgrandfather.
In 1852, Coe was shot while playing poker in a saloon. Before he died eight days later, he wrote out his will, portioning out to his wife and 12 children his estate, which included stock, racehorses and slaves.
He bequeathed to his daughter, Rachel, 21-month-old Dan, her half-brother.
In defense of the Confederacy, the word “heritage” is romanticized. But its literal definition is property that is or may be inherited. Even if the property you inherit is your little brother.
Dan was 14 when the Civil War ended, and I’ve long wondered about the work he had to do for his sister and at what age he started.
One of Coe’s white sons was also named Phil Coe, and his claim to fame is that in 1871 in Abilene, Kan., he became the last known man killed in a gunfight by Hickok.
There once was a wax museum in Grand Prairie that depicted Hickok shooting Coe. When I visited it, as a kid, my grandfather pointed and said, “That was your great-great-uncle.”
The information thrilled me. “Really! Wild Bill Hickok was my uncle?”
“No,” my grandfather said. “The man getting shot is your uncle.”
My grandfather was darkskinned, but I didn’t think about how that white man could be my great-great-uncle and his uncle. Family history and the horrible implications would be filled in later.
To put it simply: Phil Coe, a white man, fought for the Confederacy so that his black half-brother, Dan, could remain the property of his sister.
Two years ago, through the lens of my family’s history, I
E. Lee is coming down in Richmond, Va., military bases named after Confederate generals, including Fort Hood in Killeen, may change their names, and NASCAR has banned Confederate flags.
Most of the Confederate monuments didn’t spring up until decades after the Civil War. As a Southern Poverty Law Center report in 2016 showed, there was an accelerated rise in these monuments during two periods in history. The first was in the early 1900s, when states were enacting Jim Crow laws against black people, and then in midcentury during the civil rights movement.
At one time, nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments stood across the United States, including one of a Confederate soldier in Travis Park that was erected in 1900 and removed in 2017. These were monuments to men who took up arms against the United States. In what other conflict would enemy combatants against our government — be they American or foreign — be honored with statues?
We’re repeatedly told removing these statues is an erasure of history when the truth is they were raised to distort history and perpetuate myths.
We’re living in a time when more Americans — specifically, white Americans — seem open to learning more of their nation’s history and the experiences unique to some of their fellow citizens.
At the heart of that history is slavery, which in generations of school textbooks was briefly described as a bad thing that was done to black people. But a war was fought, the bad thing ended, and everyone lived happily and equally ever after.
Slavery was an institution that lasted nearly 250 years in the United States. It was critical to the founding, governing and economic development of our nation and the legacy it bequeaths to future generations. Historically, throughout the world, slavery wasn’t driven by racism, but it lasted so long in our country that, eventually, racism was used to justify it.
Emancipation and the 13th Amendment ended slavery, but not racism. In her essay “The Slavebody and the Blackbody,” Toni Morrison writes, “In this racism, the slavebody disappears but the blackbody remains and is morphed into a synonym for poor people, a synonym for criminalism and a flash point for public policy. For there is no discourse in economics, in education, in housing, in religion, in health care, in entertainment, in the criminal justice system, in welfare, in labor policy — in almost any of the national debates that continue to baffle us — in which the blackbody is not the elephant in the room; the ghost in the machine; the subject, if not the topic, of the negotiations.”
The Civil War wasn’t simply a national metaphor of brother fighting against brother. In my family, it was brother fighting to keep brother enslaved. Phil took up arms to keep Dan in chains.
Most of the men fighting for the Confederacy didn’t own slaves, and many were poor. But had they prevailed, all slaves would have remained slaves.
The Confederate monuments commemorating them are symbols of slavery and the racism justifying slavery. That doesn’t mean that people passionate about honoring their ancestors who do not want to see the monuments come down are racists or bad people. I’ve interacted with enough to know that some are, but many are not.
But it hasn’t crossed their minds that when they talk about heritage and put “Sons” and “Daughters” and “Children” in the names of pro-Confederacy organizations, they’re not thinking about the heritage of those sons, daughters and children of the Confederacy who were black and enslaved.
Through bloodlines, I’m a son of the Confederacy and a son of slavery, but it’s my white heritage they have in mind, not my black heritage. They want to celebrate my great-great-uncle for fighting in the Civil War, but they don’t want to consider the consequences for my great-great-grandfather had the Confederates been victorious.
My great-great-grandfather who, along with his two siblings, were conceived in violence because their father owned the right and title to the body of their mother.
Where is the statue that honors the heritage of my great-greatgreat-grandmother, “a certain Negro girl named Louisa”?