Birthday of a Nation: The US Confederacy celebrates its 1st Anniversary in a look back at history

On Dec. 24, 1861, the Charleston, S.C. Courier gave an impassioned account of the first anniversary of secession, as it was celebrated in the true birthplace of the Confederacy. “The Confederate and State Flags floated over the Custom House, the Old Exchange – which connects Charleston of this day with the Charleston of Colonial history, and with the names and services of LAURENS, GADSDEN, PINCKNEY, and their compeers of 1776.”

As the Courier’s coverage made clear, the fledgling entity known as the Confederate States of America connected its present and future to a glorious Revolutionary past – the same past that the Union celebrated every July 4. The Confederacy, as its partisans would continue to do long past the years of the Civil War itself, sought justification and spiritual solace in the heroes of the founding (and later the Confederate) generation, a wrinkle in any attempt to understand the Confederacy’s worldview.

Like Lincoln himself, we have often treated the C.S.A. as an uncomfortable chapter in the national story, to the point that we try to excise it from that story altogether. In order to truly worship at the national shrine, only certain occasions befit the United States, that entity abandoned by half the nation for a little over four years. Our days of national remembrance underscore a particularly Lincolnian understanding of the Civil War. The Confederacy is treated as a rebellion in the 16th president’s wonderful and decidedly modern political logic; if we believe the Confederacy is still part of the Union, then it is so. Lincoln persistently maintained to the public (past and since) that the Confederacy never really left. Read More