My Confederate Ancestor
It turns out my great grand-daddy was a Lost Causer.
Growing up, there were a couple of “family legends,” passed down orally, one of which was that, as a young private in J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry during the Civil War, he had gone down to take a swim in the river, hitched his horse and undressed. While he was swimming, some of his fellow soldiers played a practical joke, absconding to camp with all of his clothes and forcing him to ride back bare-assed.
Another was that his second son, my grandfather, a successful businessman and genteel ex-Southerner whose hobby was writing “doggerel poetry,” used to refer to black people as “darkies.” It was clear to me these snippets were meant to be taken as vaguely amusing. As a young boy in a New Jersey college town, I wasn’t sure what to make of them. As I got older, they stayed in the back of my mind and became increasingly questionable, but I never took much time to consider them in the bigger picture nor connect them with some of the uglier chapters in our nation’s history.
John Rison Gibbons was born in Richmond, Virginia, which became the capital of the Confederacy, in 1843. His mother’s family was from Rockingham County, the seat of which is Harrisonburg, in the Shenandoah Valley, about 120 miles to the northwest of Richmond. At the age of 17, while he was still in prep school, John volunteered for the Harrisonburg Company (designated with the letter I) of the Virginia Cavalry’s 1st Regiment, which fought with the Army of Northern Virginia under Gen. Robert E. Lee. John participated in most of the army’s major battles, including Chancellorsville, Spottsylvania and Gettysburg, where 25 of his unit’s 310 men were killed. In April, 1865, John was with the regiment at Appomattox for Lee’s surrender to Grant, marking the end of the war.
J.R. Gibbons went on to work for the American Bauxite Company, which became Alcoa; he was instrumental in setting up the company’s aluminum plant in Arkansas and founding the company town of Bauxite there. [Bauxite is the ore that’s smelted into aluminum.] John’s sons John Felton Gibbons and George Rison Gibbons also worked for the firm. The latter, my grandfather, retired in 1950 as Alcoa’s longest tenured employee. By then, the family had been living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for many years and its southern roots were but quaint—and presumably fond--memories.
John Rison Gibbons, 1843-1919
Not so long ago, I did a web search and found an obituary of my great-grandfather from the Confederate Veterans Magazine, September, 1919. The article featured a picture of him sporting a bushy white walrus moustache and goatee, frameless spectacles, proudly wearing his gray dress uniform. Which brings us to The Lost Cause.
The Lost Cause was a vast socio-political and historical movement, a widespread and largely successful effort to rebrand the South’s secession, the Civil War and the Confederacy’s eventual defeat as a noble, honorable struggle. The war itself was referred to as the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression. It wasn’t about slavery; it was about preserving the Southern way of life and upholding the Jeffersonian ideal of states’ rights. Slavery was a benign institution, a benevolent system; the enslaved were better off under it. Confederate soldiers were portrayed as chivalrous and gallant; highly skilled and tremendously brave, they only lost because they were numerically overwhelmed by the Union hordes.
After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, my great grand-daddy and the other young men in his unit were allowed to lay down their arms and ride home to their family farms where they would participate in the reconstruction of the South. For the next 100-odd years, the powers that be in the former Confederacy orchestrated a backlash against the freeing of the slaves and the preservation of the Union, imposing segregation laws and discriminatory practices across the South, oppressing the freed African-Americans and terrorizing them with frequent lynchings—and “damn the Feds if they try to tell us how to run our governments.” The Lost Cause was propaganda in the name of this regime. A big part of it was erecting monuments to confederate soldiers and their battlefield commanders.
My great-grandfather was an active member of the United Confederate Veterans for the rest of his life. By the time he passed away in 1919, he had worked his way up to the rank of general in his adopted state of Arkansas. His obituary in the veterans’ magazine was dripping with Lost Cause sentimentality:
“Comrade Gibbons always led a very active life, and in the growth, welfare, and development of the community he was consistent in his efforts. He was most patriotic and had a deep affection for his adopted State… He was interested in matters that affected the history of the War between the States and in the Confederate veteran organization. He was a member of Omer R. Weaver Camp, No 354, U.C.V., of Little Rock and was Commander of that body several years, discharging the duties of his office with rare tact and ability during his incumbency. …In the State organization…he discharged the duties assigned him in these respective positions with such zeal and fidelity that his comrades elected him to commend the Arkansas Division, and as such he was commissioned Major General.”
According to this account, one of his crowning achievements in the U.C.V. was organizing the return of the flag of the 70th Ohio Volunteers, captured by the 1st Arkansas Volunteers at Ringgold Gap, Ga., in 1863. According to the obit, “It was his idea…as a symbol of the spirit of the South” and “it brought forth wide and favorable comment from the Northern and Eastern press.”
The distinguished historian David Blight, a professor at Yale, wrote about the Lost Cause in a recent New Yorker article, noting that the first commander-in-chief of the U.C.V. was General John B. Gordon, a former senator and governor of Georgia and also a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. “By 1920,” Blight wrote, “virtually no one in the South, black or white, could miss seeing a veterans’ parade, or a statue of a Confederate soldier leaning on his musket with sweet innocence and regional pride. Schools, streets, and parks were named for Confederates. And, at one dedication after another, the message sent to black Southerners was that the Lost Cause was no longer lost. It had, instead, become a victory narrative about the overturning of Reconstruction and the reëstablishment of white supremacy.”
I’d like to think my great-grandfather’s Confederate zeal was well-meaning and largely innocent, that he was merely a reflection of his time and place in American history, and not a hard-core racist or white supremacist; that, in reasonable, reflective moments he didn’t glimpse the evil folly of “the cause.” But I’d be naïve to believe that. If I were German and discovered a relative who was a Nazi, I’d want to know more. Complacency is complicity. My great-grandfather wasn’t just complicit, he was active and celebratory. It’s important for current generations to understand and acknowledge the sins of their forefathers. I aim to contact Professor Blight and ask him to point me in the direction of further research. If I find out anything more, I’ll let you know.