Oh, I'm a good old rebel...

It's some years ago now, but I think it was the first time my dear friend Mike invited me and a few others to his Reading fastness to have lunch with the whole Hennessy clan. We had a roaring time - Mike and Kathryn are the most hospitable of souls - and after lunch there was some singing. Mike's stock in trade is Irish rebel songs (The Rocky Road to Dublin featured quite heavily), and eventually, as it had to, it was my turn. I am not musical by any means, and I cannot even manage the bodhrán which was being passed around - I simply can't get the hang of the wrist movement (no sniggering at the back). My friend Tom had played the piano for a bit, so it was only fair that I produced something. I scratched my head, and eventually (I was thinking on my feet) I sang Hoyt Axton's I'm A Good Old Rebel, which has a simple enough tune and to which I knew all the words.

Now, I am a Civil War enthusiast. I find that 1861-65 period utterly fascinating, when a nation, a relatively new one at that, came close to tearing itself apart. I read a book as a teenager, on war-gaming, as it happens, which asserted that Conservatives are more likely to be Confederate supporters while Labour voters will tend towards the Union. I'm not sure about that. But I'll come back to the point. I think that Ken Burns's television documentary The Civil War is probably the best single piece of TV that has ever been produced, and I encourage everyone to watch it. Its rolling majesty is formidable, from David McCullough's peerless commentary to the beautiful soundtrack, old and new. Ashokan Farewell, which many people think is an old folk tune but was actually written in the 1980s, is a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, and if you don't cry at the narration of Sullivan Ballou's last letter to his wife Sarah before the first Battle of Bull Run, then, really, there is no hope for you as a human being. (I have just listened to it again am sobbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0C-euAyCTU0).

That's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to explore deeper truths. I am, I will say say now, a good old rebel. I think the Southern states had a cause, and one for which thousands of men gave their lives. And it wasn't slavery. I will aver, as any decent person can and must, that the practice of human bondage was a deplorable thing, and it redounds to the United Kingdom's credit that we were instrumental in banning and enforcing that ban of the slave trade (years ago, I worked for the board in Parliament which commemorated the 200th anniversary of our banning slavery). It is horrible to think that millions of Americans in 1861 were owned by other Americans, as chattels, goods, to be bought, sold and traded, several times during their lives, and worked mercilessly during their short and brutal lives. When Southern slaves were married, the vows were altered to read that they took one another till "death or distance" parted them. The abolition of slavery in the United States was a great thing, and it should have come well before the 1860s.

So far, so platitudinous. No-one except a maniac could disagree with what I've written. Yet I still say I am a "rebel", a supporter of the Confederacy. Because I believe, and this is not an uncontroversial view, that the Civil War did not start because, or primarily because, of slavery. Certainly, the ending of slavery – practiced by pretty much half of the states in the Union by 1861 – was not a stated war aim of the North when the conflict began. What the Southern states objected to, though slavery was a cause celebre, was the imposition of the power of the federal government on the individual states. It is summed up best by the great writer (and possessor of one of the most wonderful Southern voices I have heard), Shelby Foote, whose three-volume tale of the Civil War is a must-read. He said simply that none of the Southern states would have gone into the Union if they didn’t think they could get out. When the crunch came, and they wanted to secede, the Yankees said no.

It is, I think, the inevitability of human progress that slavery in the South would have ended. Perhaps later (ten, twenty years?) than it did after the Union victory at Appomatox Court House, but eventually. But what strikes me, and makes me a Johnny Reb as opposed to a Yankee, is the Gadsden flat, the coiled rattlesnake with the motto “Don’t tread on me”. If the USA is anything, it is an association of states who threw off what they saw as overweening authority (in the War of Independence I would definitely have been a loyalist, but that’s another story). So when the government in DC tried to tell the Southern states how to govern their affairs, they did what their grandfathers had done, and said “To hell with you”. States’ right.

There will be many who disagree with this, who revere Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, and the Civil War as a noble cause to free people from bondage. That may have been the effect, but it was not the cause. Not in my opinion. Am I sorry the Confederacy lost? I don’t know, not least because they could never have won. A largely agrarian society of a few million taking on an industrialised nation of many more millions? Foregone conclusion. But, for me, the most eloquent epitaph on the Civil War is that given by a Southern soldier, when asked why he was fighting. “I’m fightin’ ’cause you’re down here”, he said. Exactly so.