www.sptimes.com/2007/10/07/State/In_defense_of_his_Con.shtml


In defense of his Confederate pride
Nelson Winbush is intent on defending the flag of his grandfather. It's just surprising which flag that is.
By STEPHANIE GARRY, Times Staff Writer
Published October 7, 2007

KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle.

The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag.

Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States."

His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt.

Winbush is also black.

"You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"

* * *

Winbush's nondescript white brick house near Kissimmee's quaint downtown is cluttered with the mess of a life spent hoarding history.

Under the glass of his coffee table lie family photos, all of smiling black people. On top sits Ebony magazine.

Winbush is retired and a widower who keeps a strict schedule of household chores, family visits and Confederate events. He often eats at Fat Boy's Barbecue, where his Sons of Confederate Veterans camp meets.

Winbush's words could come from the mouth of any white son of a Confederate veteran. They subscribe to a sort of religion about the war, a different version than mainstream America.

The tenets, repeated endlessly by loyalists:

The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.

But Winbush has a conceptual canyon to bridge: How can a black man defend a movement that sought to keep his people enslaved?

* * *

Winbush is one of at most a handful of black members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the country. He knows skeptics question his story and his sanity.

To win them over, he pulls out his grandfather's pension papers, reunion photos and obituary. He also gives speeches, mostly before white audiences.

Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.

"It was an exercise in rhetoric, that's all," Winbush says.

His views run counter to many historical accounts. Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III, the field operations chief for the NAACP, called Winbush's arguments illogical. Rivers spoke with Winbush by telephone a few years ago, intrigued by his position. Rivers remembers him being loud and sincere, holding fast to his convictions.

"I was courteous and respectful and respectfully disagreed with him," Rivers said. "This is America. He has a right to believe what he wants to."

At one speech, Winbush stood in front of the square battle flag that draped his grandfather's coffin, retelling the stories he has told so many times that the words emerge in identical iterations.

At the end of his talk, he held the microphone to a stereo and played a song by the Rebelaires, with a sorrowful, bluesy rhythm: "You may not believe me, but things was just that way. Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray."

Once other Confederates recognize that his story is real, they love him. Opponents often attack white Confederates as ignorant or racist. Winbush is harder to dismiss. If nothing else, the naysayers are more willing to listen.

"It kinda wipes out the whole segregation and hate and racism issue," said Christopher Hall, 29, commander of Winbush's SCV camp. "Coming from him, that really can't be an argument."

* * *

Winbush's views were once more widespread, even in the land of theme parks and turnpikes.

Florida was the third state to secede. Its Civil War governor, John Milton, shot himself rather than rejoin the North, telling the Legislature, "Death would be preferable to reunion." Former Gov. Lawton Chiles defended the Confederate flag in 1996 when black lawmakers asked for its removal from the Capitol.

"You can't erase history," Chiles said at the time.

But now neo-Confederates are losing this second war of culture and memory.

Confederate flags are coming down, especially from the tops of Southern statehouses, including Florida's in 2001.

The agrarian Bible Belt has become the Sun Belt, full of northerners with few deep roots in the area. Identification with the South as a region has declined since the World War II era, which united the country with patriotism and the interstate system. Areas of South Florida, for instance, are known better as the sixth borough of New York than part of the Deep South.

High school teachers don't preach the righteousness of the South. And historians, for the most part, agree that the Civil War was about slavery, undermining the standard neo-Confederate argument.

But Confederate loyalists are digging in. Winbush considers the South his homeland. And his family history, because it's rarer than that of white Confederates, is in danger of extinction.

* * *

Slowly, in his deep, rough voice, Winbush tells the story of a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war with the sons of his master.

"They grew up together," Winbush says.

At first his grandfather cooked and looked out for the others, but later he saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and plantation owner.

At Shiloh, a two-day battle in 1862 in which more than 23,000 American men were killed or wounded, the Confederate Army needed a chaplain. Louis Nelson couldn't read or write, but he had memorized the King James Bible.

He stayed on as chaplain for the next four campaigns, leading services for both Confederate and Union soldiers, before they headed back to the battlefield.

He also foraged for food. One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.

"When you don't have anything else, mule meat tastes pretty good," he would tell his grandson.

Some topics even the loquacious grandfather considered off limits. He wouldn't talk about the Union siege of Vicksburg, a bloody battle that captured an important Mississippi River port and effectively split the South. Nearly 20,000 people died.

After the war, he lived as a free man on the James Oldham plantation for 12 more years. Then he became a plasterer, traveling the South to work on houses.

Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions, wearing a woolly gray uniform that Winbush still has.In photos, he stands next to two white men who accompanied him to soldiers' reunions until they were old men. Through the sepia gleams a dignity earned on the battlefield.

"When he came back, that was storytelling time," Winbush says.

His grandfather died in 1934. The local paper ran an obituary that called him a "darky." Winbush is proud that his grandfather's death was marked at all.

* * *

Winbush grew up in the house his grandfather built in 1908, a two-story yellow structure with a wraparound porch in Ripley, Tenn. The Oldham plantation, where his grandfather was a slave, provided the wood in recognition of his loyalty to the family.

Winbush and his siblings lived in a family of educators. His grandmother and mother were teachers. He says he first went to school as a baby in a basket.

All three children went to college. Winbush studied biology in hopes of becoming a doctor but didn't have enough money for medical school. He switched to studying physical education.

Winbush moved to Florida in 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated school desegregation. Like many around the country, Osceola County schools remained segregated for several more years.

He didn't mind the divide because he felt both black and white students got a better education by not being able to use racial conflict as an excuse. When the superintendent, a friend of his, decided it was time to integrate in the late 1960s, Winbush agreed. The time had come, he thought, when people could accept the change.

Winbush thinks that people will get along if they know each other. He says he never suffered any blatant racism. The small Southern towns he lived in were familiar and accepting.

He remembers the "I Have A Dream" speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He respects King but disagrees with his reverence for Lincoln.

Winbush wasn't moved by the speech. King was just speaking the truth, he says, but it didn't change the daily reality of blacks.

* * *

Winbush's convictions about the war lay dormant until 1991, when the NAACP began an all-out campaign against the Confederate flag, saying it was a symbol of hatred. It vowed to have it removed from public places by the end of the decade.

Winbush saw it differently, and he was retiring. He no longer worried about what some "Yankee boss" would think.

"I got fed up about all this politically correct mess," he says.

He joined the Sons and started speaking at their events. He twice appeared before the Virginia Legislature to dissuade them from taking down the flag. He collects clippings of newspaper stories written about his speeches. One shows him posing in front of a statute of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Winbush acknowledges that misuse of the Confederate flag has made it a symbol of hate in some people's eyes. But he says the American flag is just as racist. Troops of color are sent to die disproportionately in American wars, he says, and the Stars and Stripes flew above slave ships.

Rivers, the NAACP official, said people like Winbush need to let go of their family history and admit that all people, even those now dead, are imperfect.

"Just because your grandfather was wrong does not mean you can't break the generational curse and not be wronged too," he says.

* * *

Winbush is the last direct link to his grandfather, someone who heard the stories firsthand and felt the passion.

He feels the legacy of Confederate soldiers like his grandfather won't survive unless the history is past within families, from one generation to the next.

But it's not easy. Even Winbush's son, a Naval Academy graduate who works for IBM, once tried to talk Winbush into donating his Confederate collection to a museum.

"This is the only way some people will find out what did happen," he said. "The history books leave it out."

Winbush knows he won't be around forever. He only hopes that someone will continue to tell the stories.

Times researchers Carolyn Edds and John Martin contributed to this report. Stephanie Garry can be reached at [email protected].

Predictions on the outcome of this thread?

Quoted: Predictions on the outcome of this thread?

Same as always... 10 pages a lock and a timeout.

Tag for later, but looks good so far...

-Ben

2 Words...

Executive Summary.

Quoted: www.sptimes.com/2007/10/07/State/In_defense_of_his_Con.shtml The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.

Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.

Well, I'll be damned...somebody else actually understands what happened. Mr. Winbush, I salute you sir.

He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell.

But no matter what issues the South or the North used to justify it, at its core the war was all about slavery.

Even a Southern slave-owner like Thomas Jefferson could see that, and he died 35 years before it started.

Quoted: Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States."

Gramps must have been an old school poser. Any self respecting rebel calls it "The War Of Northern Aggression".

Quoted: Predictions on the outcome of this thread?

Five pages, lots of yankees shitting all over the thread and repeating "hur hur, we won, get over it, we won we won", followed by two bans and a lock.




I wonder if he's the same black guy who hung a giant Confederate battle flag off an overpass when some school was being sued for their mascot.

Quoted: Quoted: www.sptimes.com/2007/10/07/State/In_defense_of_his_Con.shtml The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history. Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority. Well, I'll be damned...somebody else actually understands what happened. Mr. Winbush, I salute you sir.

Indeed. He understands exactly.

I was born in Connecticut.

I found freedom in the South.

I will never go back North.

Quoted: Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States." His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt. Winbush is also black. "You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"

Here's what the fuss is all over.

The neo-Confederates argue that slaves fought goes to the greater issue of the war’s cause and cite it to support their position that the war wasn't over slavery but over states' rights. That (some) slaves fought for the Confederacy is asserted as "proof" of the lost cause myth of happy slaves living contently under servitude of benevolent masters.  The Unionists argue that the war was indeed over slavery and the states right issue was the issue of ownership of slaves.  The number of slaves who fought for the Confederacy was small.  As fighting men some were, like the reluctant pair of gunners at Yorktown, forced to fight at gunpoint.  Their contribution was small to the Confederate effort. Contrast this to the 180,000 who fought as Union soldiers and another 10,000 as sailors.  Add to this an unknown quantity who served as manservants, cooks, teamsters, laborers, and washer-women (Suzie King Taylor types).  Altogether, over 200,000 freely served the Union. The throngs of slaves who rushed to Union soldiers seeking freedom speaks magnitudes of their yearn to breathe free. We know Sherman was displeased about them following his army and destroyed his bridges so they couldn't follow him. So much for the myth of being content & living happily in servitude. Finally, there's the adaptation of the old lawyer analysis for liability: But for slavery, would there have been a war? I believe not. Chandra Manning's book, What This Cruel War Was Over, provides an excellent analysis and supports many things I've come to believe on my own.

BTW, contact the Company of Military Historians.  The last issue of their quarterly has  an article entitled, The Black Confederate Sharpshooter.

Quoted: He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell. But no matter what issues the South or the North used to justify it, at its core the war was all about slavery. Even a Southern slave-owner like Thomas Jefferson could see that, and he died 35 years before it started.

Bull shit.

Damn,  I love him already

Quoted: I was born in Connecticut. I found freedom in the South. I will never go back North.

One of the little restaurants downtown has a bumpersticker on the door: "Improve the South.  Buy a yankee a bus ticket."

ETA:  But we're glad to have you anyways.

I am a yankee who shares similar views....but then again everyone just thinks I got brainwashed by the Redneck Mafia.

roy d....the South will rise again!!!!!

Wow. Revisionism claims another.

Slavery on its way out ? LMAO not if the South could help it. It was their economy.
Good to be proud of ones heritage but to be that blind to reality is absurd.

I used to be a revisionist as well until I started to actually investigate all the claims I was told.

Flame away, just please bakc up claims wihtbauthorative documented proof. Preferrable from the side you are defending.

oh and in before the photo of the Lousiana Guard who were turned down by the Confederates and they ended up joining the Union and killed many Confederates.

Quoted: He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell. But no matter what issues the South or the North used to justify it, at its core the war was all about slavery. Even a Southern slave-owner like Thomas Jefferson could see that, and he died 35 years before it started.

If anyone believes the war had anything to do with slavery, then you my friend have an extra chromosome.

Quoted: Quoted: "You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"

Just once, in a Chappelle show skit about the blind black guy...

Quoted: Quoted: He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell. But no matter what issues the South or the North used to justify it, at its core the war was all about slavery. Even a Southern slave-owner like Thomas Jefferson could see that, and he died 35 years before it started. If anyone believes the war had anything to do with slavery, then you my friend have an extra chromosome.

Ever read the declarations of intent to seceed from Georgia or Texas? They flat out state it was their reason. As did others in their declarations of intent to seceed.

Quoted: Quoted: He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell. But no matter what issues the South or the North used to justify it, at its core the war was all about slavery. Even a Southern slave-owner like Thomas Jefferson could see that, and he died 35 years before it started. Bull shit.

Jefferson correctly predicted that slavery would eventually divide the Union.  He said the issue terrified him more "than a fire bell in the night".

You must have missed in history class the discussions about the Missouri Compromise, the near-secession of South Carolina in 1832, the Compromise of 1850, the warm-up for the Civil War in Kansas and Missouri in 1856, all topped off by John Brown's raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry.

BTW, Mr. Brown wasn't just a gun collector; he wanted to steal US army weapons and arm slaves and start a rebellion.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 were about slavery, where Lincoln predicted that the US would eventually either be all slave or all free but not both.

It was those debates that caused many in the South to believe that Lincoln would abolish slavery if given the chance, so that's why Lincoln didn't receive a single popular vote from any state in the Deep South.  That's also why all seven of those states had seceded before Lincoln had spent a single day in the White House.

So yes, there were issues of State's Rights and taxation and economic and cultural differences that helped bring about the Civil War.  But at the core of every one of them was the practice of slavery.

Take that away, and you would end up with nothing more than vigorous debates in Congress.

FINALLY!  I get into a Civil War thread before it gets locked!

IBTL baby!!!!

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell. But no matter what issues the South or the North used to justify it, at its core the war was all about slavery. Even a Southern slave-owner like Thomas Jefferson could see that, and he died 35 years before it started. If anyone believes the war had anything to do with slavery, then you my friend have an extra chromosome. Ever read the declarations of intent to seceed from Georgia or Texas? They flat out state it was their reason. As did others in their declarations of intent to seceed. The IDEA of slavery was a result of what the south was fighting against. FEDERALISM.

What is up with your avatar?

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell. But no matter what issues the South or the North used to justify it, at its core the war was all about slavery. Even a Southern slave-owner like Thomas Jefferson could see that, and he died 35 years before it started. If anyone believes the war had anything to do with slavery, then you my friend have an extra chromosome. Ever read the declarations of intent to seceed from Georgia or Texas? They flat out state it was their reason. As did others in their declarations of intent to seceed.

Texas was an exception for a number of reasons, not the least being the strong opposition from the German part of the state.  Texas is not a good example and you know it.  Lots of people in Texas then wanted to leave the Confederacy.  It wasn't the same situation.

It would have been so much easier if we had just stayed independant.

Bottom line.

Anyone who fights against and kills US troops is my enemy.  

CSA be damned.

Quoted: Bottom line. Anyone who fights against and kills US troops is my enemy.   CSA be damned.

Well, then I hope you're glad to know that todays problems with this country are a result of the assholes we should have finished off.

Enjoying gun control?

Quoted: Quoted: Bottom line. Anyone who fights against and kills US troops is my enemy.   CSA be damned. Well, then I hope you're glad to know that todays problems with this country are a result of the assholes we should have finished off. Enjoying gun control?

Exactly what "assholes" are you talking about?

Quoted: KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle. The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag. Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States." His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt. Winbush is also black. "You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"

H. K. Edgerton is another black Confederate-side activist/reenactor/living history buff.  Nice guy, too.

Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: www.sptimes.com/2007/10/07/State/In_defense_of_his_Con.shtml The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history. Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority. Well, I'll be damned...somebody else actually understands what happened. Mr. Winbush, I salute you sir. Indeed. He understands exactly.

Except the part about the SOUTH starting the damn war before Lincoln had a chance to do anything...

They started the war because their candidate lost the election....

Not out of some high-minded principles WRT 'states rights'....

It was a simple revolt, and like all revolts it was the responsibility of the national government to put said revolt down...

The situation was handled appropriately...

That's all...

Is is Monday already?

This guy had the right idea.

We need to clone him, give him 3 heavy divisions and send him through Iran.

Quoted: Quoted: Bottom line. Anyone who fights against and kills US troops is my enemy.   CSA be damned. Well, then I hope you're glad to know that todays problems with this country are a result of the assholes we should have finished off. Enjoying gun control?

Gun control that had it's roots in the southern states??? Yeah...

Enjoying all those civil rights (for all races) that the southern states had to be dragged kicking & screaming into acknowledging by the USSC?

Or how about enjoying a North American continent free from European interfearance???

All brought to you by the preservation of the Union...

Quoted: Predictions on the outcome of this thread?

The usual suspects line up and start throwing their turds at each other…

I resemble a usual suspect.

Quoted: He sounds like a great guy with alot of interesting stories to tell.

Would like to sit down and have a few beers with that man.

page 2 and the original post and premise has almost been forgotten already  

Amazing story.  I greatly respect the man and his convictions.  I won't get into the debate because the arguments in the Constitutional Convention are not yet settled more than 200 years later.  I was born in CT but grew up in Florida and am a solid Southerner.  Not racist at all (not white or black) and love my history.

for later...