Earlier this month marked the 160th Anniversary of Robert E Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to US Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. To the best of my knowledge, two of my ancestors were at or in the vicinity of Appomattox when the surrender happened. Both men, unlike many of their Confederate comrades, likely had access to horse or rail transportation. I’ve found myself wondering what they were thinking about as they returned to their homes in North Carolina and Virginia.
As it happened their great great great grandson—160 years after they confronted military defeat at the hands of the Army of the Potomac—was teaching World War I at a college founded by abolitionists in Michigan. There is, by my lights, no war that left a greater legacy of the futility of human politics than the First World War.
It’s my custom to play Celtic punk rock band Dropkick Murphy’s cover of Green Fields for my students. The song relates the story of a traveler on holiday in France who happens to sit down beside the grace of a fallen soldier in the British Army, Willie McBride. The song relates the questions the traveler might have asked the soldier when he died in 1916, by inference at the Battle of the Somme.
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
Although, you died back in 1916
In that faithful heart are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed in forever behind the glass frame
In an old photograph, torn, battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
The sadness of the death is all there in the evocative imagery that summons up the image of grieving widows and sweethearts, children and parents. And the scale of the carnage is hard to ignore, even in the bucolic peace of later years. Although “the sun now it shines on the green fields of France and there’s no gas, no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now,” nonetheless “here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land” and “Countless white crosses stand mute in the sand” as a testament “to man's blind indifference to his fellow man,” and “to a whole generation that were butchered and damned.”
The most haunting suggestion in “Green Fields of France,” however, is not the sadness of the respective causes, but the futility of them and the emptiness of the deaths of so many men. Did Willie McBride and his comrades “know why they died?” Did “they believe when they answered the cause…that this war would end wars?” The answer lingers. “The sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain, The killing and dying, were all done in vain.” War “happened again, And again, and again, and again, and again…”
That a song like “Green Fields of France” could even be written is a testament to a society that had socially confronted the emptiness and futility of a political cause. As I listened to it the week of the Confederacy’s defeat it occurred to me that I had never heard a song, listened to a sermon, or even read a book written by a southerner in the aftermath that suggested the cause of the Confederacy—maintaining a republican society wedded to racial caste—was empty and futile. The scale of death and destruction in the South certainly should have prompted the question. Around six percent of adult British men died in World War 1. By comparison death in the southern states was staggering during the Civil War; over thirteen percent of southern men lost their lives in an undeniably losing and fruitless cause.
To quote Pulitzer winner David Potter, slavery was dead, secession was dead, and 600,000 men were dead. And yet few southern evangelical protestants thought the cause was empty or futile. In A Consuming Fire Eugene Genovese suggested that some of the more reflective southern Protestants might have thought they failed to live up to the standards of a holy God and were judged for it, but even fewer could squarely confront the emptiness and futility of trying to maintain racial caste in a Christian society by political or military means. Southerners’ conviction that their cause wasn’t futile, in fact, no doubt played a role in the terrorism and violence against free Afro-Americans in the Reconstruction Era. The KKK and their allies, however, might have saved themselves the trouble of a race war.
In contrast, southern society in the 1970s and 80s, weary of being a cultural, economic, and social pariah, put aside its en masse institutional racism, perhaps less out of altruism, than from a definitive confrontation with the absolute futility of trying to maintain Jim Crow in an era when cities like Atlanta and Charlotte had become “too busy to hate.” In the process, the South became a place where both black and white people could prosper, raise families, and attend churches without the threat of racial violence.
In 2022, Brookings wrote that “the reversal of the Great Migration,” the movement of Afro-Americans to northern cities at the beginning of the 20th Century, “began as a trickle in the 1970s, increased in the 1990s, and turned into a virtual evacuation from many northern areas in subsequent decades. The movement is largely driven by younger, college-educated Black Americans, from both northern and western places of origin.” Young Afro-Americans “have contributed to the growth of the ‘New South,’ especially in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, as well as metropolitan regions such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. These same areas “are simultaneously in the midst of new immigrant growth and white in-migration, the continuing ‘New Great Migration’ has served to give Black Americans a large—and in many cases, dominant—presence in most parts of America’s South.”
Modern southern Evangelicals, for the most part, and for a variety of reasons have realized the futility of racism. But a few, largely schismatic folk Calvinists in exurban or rural spaces, many of whom originally hail from California or other blue states, have yet to confront the futility of maintaining racial caste or race realism. Fueled by a mix of syncretic postmillennial theonomy or Christian nationalism, social media, and a distinctive politic of white resentment, these Christians have decided that—all evidence to the contrary—the cause of the Confederacy is still possible in this Year of Our Lord 2025. Their cause is futile, of course.
Aside from simply being sinful, racism isn’t good for the economy, the civil order, or the church. Many southerners, by God’s grace, realized that over the course of the twentieth century. Kierkegaard once wrote that "it is good to be tired and wearied by the futile search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.” I only wish the South would have been more tired and weary by their futile search for a race-based order earlier.