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What if you found out your ancestors fought on the ‘wrong’ side?

Thomas Thompson’s son William remembered exactly when he saw the Union soldiers: 10 a.m. on a sweltering July 13, 1864. They were with General Stoneman’s cavalry, and when one of them saw the two boys by the house he rode right over. Where’s the horse? he asked abruptly, and William, the elder, pointed toward the pasture.

The soldiers scattered. One man found a halter and headed for the horse; another corralled the cow. The others searched the barn and the house. When they left, they took virtually everything the family had: 240 dozen bundles of oats, 80 bushels of corn, 250 pounds of bacon and 280 pounds of flour, all the livestock. They were under orders, they said; no exceptions. Not even for Union men.

Wait a minute, I thought. Union men?

The ornate penmanship was hard to read, especially on microfiche. I double-checked the date: March 11, 1872. Place: Randolph County, Ala. Plaintiff: Thomas Thompson—my great-great-great-grandfather. And there were his words, dutifully recorded by that anonymous stenographer: “I always was, am now, and expect to be while I live, a Union man.”

I felt like I’d just been told by some "Antiques Road Show" expert that I’d been hanging my heirloom family painting upside down. My family, anti-Confederates?

Well. This could explain a lot.

I am a Southerner. I grew up south of Atlanta, within a stone’s throw of the farm that was raided that day in 1864. My family’s roots go so deep in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee that, until my generation, “foreign travel” to most of us meant crossing the county line. We’re plain vanilla Scots-Irish—the predominant gene pool of the Caucasian Deep South—and in five generations, none of us has made the history books or the Forbes 100. We had no family legends about how Aunt Minnie hid the silver from those Yankee sons of bitches, in part because back then we didn’t own any silver—or land, for that matter: Thomas Thompson was a tenant farmer.

Southerners tend to have a more than passing interest in the Civil War, for good reason. We are the only Americans who have ever had a war fought on our own soil, and we are the only Americans whose civilian population was explicitly targeted by the invading army. These things leave scars. Southerners know what the Serbs and the Croats, the Palestinians and the Israelis, the Shiites and the Sunnis also know: in historical terms, 135 years is nothing.

But what, exactly, did “being a Southerner” mean to me? On my office wall, I keep a copy of a story from the satirical newspaper The Onion, with a picture of three beer-swilling rednecks on the front porch of a shack; they look like they have never bestirred themselves in their lives except maybe to take a piss. The headline reads: “South Postpones Rising Again for Yet Another Year.” I show it to fellow Southerners, and it cracks us up. But our laughter has an edge. There are the unflattering stereotypes; there’s the headline, which transforms collective memory of a tragic past into an object of fun. It’s complicated, being Southern.

Partly, this is because our identity is based largely on a fairy tale. Remember Sir Walter Scott? (I tried reading Ivanhoe once; it was like drinking congealed molasses.) Scott’s novels were insanely popular in the early 19th century, especially in the South. It was an insular, agrarian region left relatively untouched by the Industrial Revolution, yet under increasing attack for its dependence on slavery. White Southerners of that era must have felt as if their whole way of life was being threatened, which it was. In Sir Walter’s depiction of an aristocratic society from another time, the home of the “peculiar institution” found echoes of its defense of “the Southern way of life.” And the bravado in those tales, with their noble maidens and hot-headed cavaliers fighting duels to defend their honor, so utterly captured the Southern imagination that Mark Twain, writing in 1882, stopped just short of holding Sir Walter personally to blame for the Civil War.

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