Confederate Memorial Day and Sins of the Father

Elisha was a Colonel in the Confederate militia and home guard. He was also a recruiter. What did recruitment look like?  We assume he cajoled or inspired young men, many being poor farmers to enlist and sent them off to a fate of cannon fodder in a fratricidal war.  One of those soldiers was his own son, David.

David was only nineteen when he served in the first regiment of the North Carolina Cavalry under future United States congressman, Colonel William H.H. Cowles. What he did during the war and what he saw can be imagined. After the war, he returned to his life as a farmer and became the local postmaster.

His own son, John was born around 1885. He was nearly the youngest, and likely did not remember his father as David died suddenly, after a full day’s work, at the age of 43.  The widow was left with 11 children, the youngest less than 1 year old. Little is known of John’s childhood, however, that he did not know for certain his own year of birth, says something.

John did not marry until he was nearly forty years old. He claimed to have left North Carolina to avoid marrying a cousin, and he found a young woman and settled in York County. The couple had a son, Johnnie, and 2 years later, a little girl.

Hopefully they were a happy family for a few years, but in 1927, when Johnnie was only 4, his mother died at the SC State Hospital in Columbia. She had died of a brain tumor, at least, that was the story Johnnie repeated to his own children. Her death certificate would tell a different story.

2 years later, the little sister, age 4 was killed when the car carrying the family overturned. Sister was thrown into a field. John was driving and was badly injured. Johnnie, who had been riding in the rumble seat with the girl, was banged up and suffered a concussion, but he could remember being taken into town for medical attention in a horse drawn wagon, his father cradling his dead sister in his arms.

After recovering, John and Johnnie lived an itinerate life. For a time, they lived in a boarding house in Asheville, NC, possibly at the same time as the author, Thomas Wolfe. Sometimes John got help from family members raising the boy.

Eventually, Johnnie needed to start school and the two made their way back to Rock Hill. They built a house together on Pendleton Street, one that is still there today. John was devoted to his boy and spoiled him with love and gifts. Word got back to him once that Johnnie had been seen picking up a discarded cigarette butt and smoking it. He threatened a beating and forbade this behavior.  He would give him the money to purchase cigarettes, but he had best never let him see or hear of this again.

When Johnnie was drafted and sent to Europe around D-day, John would carry around his letters home in his breast pocket. When he ran into friends, he would joyfully show off his last letter. Proof of life!

Johnnie returned to him safely. Eventually John fell into poor health. The stress of his life, poor nutrition and perhaps the same health issues which had claimed his father at a young age resulted in strokes, loss of speech and eventually loss of a leg. Johnnie took care of him, with help from his wife.

John had been good with money, and he had given his son a nest egg, with which they built what was to them a fine brick ranch-style home on the outskirts of town, with a wide door in the master bath, for John’s wheelchair. He never got to live there, as he died before the house could be completed.

Johnnie had 2 daughters. He so wanted a son, and he got one, but the boy only lived 3 weeks as he had been born with a congenital heart defect. He never got another son, but he did, years later, welcome a third daughter.

He lived out the rest of his life uneventfully. The traumas of his youth manifested in a frightening temper, which thankfully cooled in later life. He died surrounded by loved ones at age 77.

Elisha was a product of his time. We have no way of knowing if he was all in, a slaver and a secessionist, or just a southern farmer who was coerced by the wealthy elites, to execute their war to preserve the peculiar institution.  We assume that he thought he was doing the right thing. Funny thing about money and a way of life, it blinds you, or makes you ignore the blood on your hands. Right or wrong, it is hard to question something into which you were born, and which is your economic viability. It came down to money and power, as it still does today.

The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.

William Shakespeare

The Bible says the same, to the third and fourth generation, in three different Old Testament books.  Is it possible that the sins of Elisha reached into the life of his descendants, David, John, Little John, the little girl, and even the infant boy punishing those in his wake?

And what of John’s wife? Was she punished for Elisha’s sins? Or was it for the sins of her own forefathers, for you see in this family there were Confederates on both sides. Confederate ancestors, for as far as the eye can see.

Is God or the gods, or fate, so vengeful that he or they or it would reach through 2-3 generations and pluck a little girl from her widowed father, or sicken a baby boy?

 “You reap what you sow.” In the Christian faith, we are all punished for the sins of our original parents, who sought to be equal with God in the knowledge of good and evil. We continue to find new and inventive ways to cast ourselves out of the garden by willfully choosing evil over mercy and justice, extending those sins and thus our punishment into perpetuity.

Disclosure: I don’t really believe that we are punished for the sins of our ancestors, but children frequently suffer due to the poor choices and bad behavior of their parents. Whether or not Karma is generational, trauma absolutely is. Was David’s early death in part due to post traumatic stress, sustained in his service to the Lost Cause? Some of the earliest known cases of “battle fatigue” were described during the Civil War.

Did John’s never knowing his own father affect his parenting and his relationship with his wife?  His childhood may have made him the doting parent that fostered resilience in Johnnie. However, did this same austerity rob him of the skills necessary to support his wife, the young mother whose death certificate reads  “cause of death- exhaustion due to mental excitement”? (Not brain tumor.)

The answers are unknown, those who could give them long gone.

Does the curse of Elisha reach into the present, to the fourth generation? The traumas of Johnnie’s childhood, the loss of his mother and sister manifested in anger, but also in a demand for academic achievement from his own children. He was adamant that his girls would go to college. His lack of self-confidence prevented him from taking advantage of the GI Bill and he regretted that. He had no son, through whom to live vicariously, but he did have that third girl, and she was born in the middle of the second wave of feminism.

Equality of women and discrimination were a big part of the national dialogue in those days. Nontraditional careers were opening to women, and he had in his arms… a little tiny woman.   

You can do anything a man can do. You must never be dependent on a man.

He would strap her into his single engine airplane and fly her over Rock Hill, a metaphor for his dreams for her.  I heard him, of course, for I am that third daughter. Elisha was my grandfather’s grandfather.

Johnnie’s utterances were internalized, made part of my fabric and my reality. I knew nothing different.

You can do anything you want to do. Take advantage of every opportunity.

Which brings us back to Elisha. What was he told as a child? As a young man? What did he see? What beliefs did he hold, just because that’s the way it was? He knew no different. It was part of his fabric and his reality.

We all bear responsibility for the choices that we make, but the thought and internal conflict that goes into those choices may be shaped by forces beyond or before our control.

I do not seek to condemn nor venerate my great-great-grandfather, as it is not my place to do either. I can hope to redeem him by not making the same mistakes and by pursuing peace and justice in the present day.

And if there does exist some generational curse, it is my prayer that its ferocity has dissipated by this 5^th generation. Surely it has, the Bible says so, right?

Just to make sure, I diluted my Confederate DNA by procreating with an Eastern European whose own ancestors immigrated to this country after the Civil War. You can’t be too careful.

I make peace with Elisha, and I can hope that every generation makes use of knowledge of the past and avoids repeating the same mistakes. I hope that my own children, my little Anglo-Slavs, will forgive me and understand how my own childhood shaped theirs. I tried to give them every advantage, but often I couldn’t give them what they needed most. Wouldn’t it be nice if every generation truly was a clean slate, an opportunity to move forward without baggage?

Alas, it is not, and there is the elephant in the room. If I, from my seat of safety, can put a finger on events that happened one hundred plus years ago but still shaped my life, what of the descendants of the people whom Elisha sought to keep enslaved? What of the people whose parents can remember a loved one being the victim of race motivated violence? What traumatic residue are they carrying around? And how is it compounded by witnessing violence that continues today, and often is not met with justice?

As Johnnie learned that women could be liberated, hopefully our children will learn that peace, empathy and understanding are possible. Reconciliation is possible if we accurately understand the past, put it into realistic perspective and not try to paint it over in more rosy hues. We are all surviving something. Though it may be hard, we can make peace with the past and give ourselves and each other a break.