Virginia as Biggest Slaveholder Still Sees Civil War Divisively
Edward L. Ayers knew Virginia was changing when more than 2,000 people arrived on a weekday at the University of Richmond’s basketball arena to hear a new perspective on the cause of the Civil War.
One hundred and fifty years after the start of the nation’s bloodiest war, the audience sat rapt as a professor displayed a screen image of a single page in a slaveowner’s account book that showed slavery was today’s equivalent of a $100 million-a- year business.
“Nobody was outraged that we were admitting this,” said Ayers, although some in the audience told him they never realized the extent to which money motivated the war.
The lecture was part of a two-year effort that Ayers, the university’s president, has co-led to get Richmond -- once the center of the nation’s slave trade -- to confront its difficult history.
“We’re never really going to come to terms with having been the largest slave-holding state in the nation -- that’s never going to be behind us -- but Virginia’s beginning to come to terms with really a complex history,” Ayers said in an interview.
President Barack Obama navigated those crosscurrents in 2008 to win the state, and his trip to Ayers’s Richmond campus on Sept. 9 to pitch his jobs plan illustrates his desire to keep Virginia in play in the 2012 presidential campaign.
Changed Perspective
The president’s success will depend largely on his ability to take advantage of the changed perspective he tapped into three years ago and Ayers saw earlier this year. It is being driven in part by demographic shifts and by generational changes that have distanced voters from a war in which 620,000 Americans were killed.
The progress isn’t universal and change has been slow to take hold in pockets that cling to tradition, leaving the state a bundle of contradictions culturally and politically.
The technology boom of the 1990s, an infusion of government workers, and an influx of Hispanics and Asians as well as younger people has altered the fabric of a state that was dominated by a mix of older, white social and religious conservatives and a large bloc of blacks, who comprise 19 percent of the population.
In rural Lexington, where Commander in Chief of the Confederate Armies Robert E. Lee and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are buried, the Sons of Confederate Veterans last week protested a city ordinance banning the flying of the Confederate Flag on some streets.
Confederate Proclamation
Newly-elected Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, prompted outcries last year for issuing a Confederate History Month proclamation that omitted mention of slavery; within days, he amended his statement.
Divided loyalties have shaped Virginians since the Civil War began. On this day 150 years ago, Lee, the U.S. colonel who arrested abolitionist John Brown before becoming a confederate general because of greater allegiance to his home state, suffered a defeat at the battle of Cheat Mountain in what two years later became West Virginia.
The belated and incomplete acceptance of slavery as the cause of the Civil War reflects Virginia’s transforming political landscape from a low-tax, religiously-oriented conservative bastion to a swing state in which Republicans and Democrats are moving into more defined partisan camps.
Bipartisan History
Virginia for decades was governed by conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, whose ideologies weren’t dramatically different. Since 1974, the state has had five Republican governors and five Democratic governors. In the U.S. Senate, Democrat Charles S. Robb and Republican John Warner served side- by-side representing Virginia for more than a decade.
While voters elected candidates from both parties at the state level, it was a reliable Republican state when it came to presidential campaigns. Before Obama’s 2008 race, Virginia last backed a Democratic candidate in 1964, when it supported President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory.
The state’s Republican Party began shifting to a more social conservative stance in the 1980s when the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University, a Christian institution in Lynchburg, took a leadership role in the Moral Majority, an evangelical political organization that opposed abortion rights. The migration continued in the 1990s with the founding of the Christian Coalition by Pat Robertson, a television evangelist based in Virginia Beach and founder of Regent University, another faith-based school.
Candidate Visits
Those changes have helped to make Virginia an obligatory stop for Republican presidential candidates courting evangelical voters. Texas Governor Rick Perry, the Republican leading in primary polls, is scheduled to speak at Liberty University Sept. 14; Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, one of his rivals, is to appear on Sept. 28.
Democratic voters were growing and shifting as well.
Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist who headed now- Senator Mark Warner’s successful 2001 gubernatorial race as well as Democrat Jim Webb’s election to the U.S. Senate in 2006, said Virginia’s electorate transformed between the two campaigns. A decade ago, electoral and demographic data led Jarding to conclude Warner had to draw support from Republicans and independents in order to win the governor’s race.
By 2006, Jarding said, “there had been a tremendous movement in the dynamics toward the Democrats. The base was dramatically stronger,” and he concluded -- correctly, it turned out -- that a strong showing in Northern Virginia could hand Webb a victory.
First Black Governor
The state that elected the nation’s first black governor, Doug Wilder, in 1989, helped make Obama the first black president in 2008. The night before he won the presidency, Obama drew 90,000 supporters to a Northern Virginia rally in Manassas, the site of the first major battle in the Civil War.
Next year will be a test of whether the old Virginia or the new Virginia dominates the conflicted state. Obama won Virginia in 2008 by boosting turnout among blacks and young people, racking up solid victories in Northern Virginia, and in and around urban centers including Richmond and Hampton Roads.
The following year, the outcome was different. Republican McDonnell defeated Democrat Creigh Deeds in a gubernatorial election that saw lower turnout among new voters and African- Americans, and in which he carried many of the suburban and exurban areas that Obama had won 12 months earlier.
Normal Turnout
“The ‘09 electorate was the traditional one’’ in Virginia, said Quentin Kidd, a Christopher Newport University political scientist. ‘‘It’s older than it was in ‘08, it’s whiter than it was in ‘08, and it’s more economically established.’’ Obama must ‘‘overcome the reversion to the norm,’’ he added.
Brandyn Keating, heading up Obama’s Virginia campaign, said the key objective is to bring back the 2008 electorate and expand it. ‘‘That means engaging all sorts of people across the Commonwealth,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s a goal of ours to continue to do that, and we have to do that.’’
Republicans are working to deny Obama that chance. Phil Cox, who engineered McDonnell’s 2009 victory, said turnout among younger people, blacks and Democrats’ core supporters in general is likely to be lower because of disappointment in the president’s performance, leaving the two parties to compete for the swing suburbs and exurbs Obama dominated in 2008.
‘‘The Democrats can try to recreate that coalition, but I don’t think they’re going to have the ability to do that, and I do think it will revert back to a traditional turnout model,” Cox said.
Competing for Manassas
That competition is unfolding in places like Manassas --the site of Obama’s pre-election rally -- where Obama beat Republican presidential nominee John McCain, the Arizona senator, 55 percent to 44 percent in 2008. McDonnell won, 62 percent to Deeds’s 38 percent, the next year.
In neighboring Fairfax County -- where a strip mall features a grocery store, two old-fashioned barber shops flying American flags, a check-cashing storefront, and Castillos, a Mexican and Salvadoran restaurant -- Democrats’ gains have been more lasting. Obama beat McCain 60 percent to 39 percent there; the following year, McDonnell eked out a victory of 51 percent to Deeds’s 49 percent.
“There’s a moving down of the northeast megalopolis to Northern Virginia, and then an urbanization of the suburbs taking place in the lower part of the state,” in such cities as Richmond and Hampton Roads, said William Frey of the Brookings Institution.
Rural Decline
“Your strictly rural part of Virginia or small-town Virginia is just shrinking, from a demographic standpoint, although people still have those strong-held views,” Frey said, and “that make it hard for either party to dominate.”
A little ways south from the diverse exurbs of Northern Virginia, in Stafford County, sits a shed emblazoned with a Confederate flag. To some, it represents the states’ rights ideals to which John Napier, a Republican from Short Pump, said he wishes the nation would return. “That’s what the Civil War was about -- states’ rights,” said Napier, a 65-year-old salesman.
“Slavery was an abomination -- it was a terrible, terrible thing, but the war was about the states’ right to determine their own destiny, and that’s still being talked about” in today’s debates over health care and federal spending, Napier said.
Civil War Cause
Ayers, who was named the 2003 national Professor of the Year at doctoral and research universities by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education in Washington, reminds Virginians that scholars today are virtually unanimous in declaring slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
In downtown Richmond, where a statue of the black tennis star Arthur Ashe looms above Monument Avenue along with those of Confederate generals, social worker Lee Green said it’s the legacy of slavery that’s the more powerful force shaping opinions in his state.
“We have this history and nobody wants to really expose it or confront it,” said Green, a black Obama supporter who said he’s disappointed the president’s first term hasn’t yielded more racial unity. “We’re at a stalemate and we don’t acknowledge it.”
Ayers, who has published his own research proving that slavery prompted the war, said “the capital of the confederacy is actually quite” politically divided. Neither the new Virginia nor the old has prevailed in the struggle for the state’s future, he said. “The South has always been more complicated than people realize,” Ayers said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Hirschfeld Davis in Washington at jdavis159@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net
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