History Teaches Us to Hope

Reflections on the Civil War and Southern History

Charles P. Roland

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780813138541
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Before his death in 1870, Robert E. Lee penned a letter to Col. Charles Marshall in which he argued that we must cast our eyes backward in times of turmoil and change, concluding that "it is history that teaches us to hope." Charles Pierce Roland, one of the nation's most distinguished and respected historians, has done exactly that, devoting his career to examining the South's tumultuous path in the years preceding and following the Civil War. History Teaches Us to Hope: Reflections on the Civil War and Southern History is an unprecedented compilation of works by the man the volume editor John David Smith calls a "dogged researcher, gifted stylist, and keen interpreter of historical questions."Throughout his career, Roland has published groundbreaking books, including The Confederacy (1960), The Improbable Era: The South since World War II (1976), and An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War (1991). In addition, he has garnered acclaim for two biographical studies of Civil War leaders: Albert Sidney Johnston (1964), a life of the top field general in the Confederate army, and Reflections on Lee (1995), a revisionist assessment of a great but frequently misunderstood general. The first section of History Teaches Us to Hope, "The Man, The Soldier, The Historian, " offers personal reflections by Roland and features his famous "GI Charlie" speech, "A Citizen Soldier Recalls World War II." Civil War–related writings appear in the following two sections, which include Roland's theories on the true causes of the war and four previously unpublished articles on Civil War leadership. The final section brings together Roland's writings on the evolution of southern history and identity, outlining his views on the persistence of a distinct southern culture and his belief in its durability. History Teaches Us to Hope is essential reading for those who desire a complete understanding of the Civil War and southern history. It offers a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary historian.

Part One

The Man, The Soldier, The Historian

In the Beginning

I was born April 8, 1918, in the little town of Maury City in western Tennessee. The event occurred, as I was later informed, in a small wooden house that stood on a street so undistinguished that the townspeople called it simply “the lane.” Today, the street bears the name Park Avenue, an upgrading of nomenclature for which I am in no sense responsible.

My ancestry was respectable but neither wealthy nor famous. I am under the impression that my forebears were largely of Scotch-Irish stock. Some of my kinspeople have traced certain of them back to the late colonial period in North Carolina. Decades afterward they joined the great trek west and settled in southwestern Tennessee and northeastern Mississippi, where most of them have continued to live.

I came quite naturally by the urge to teach. Both my paternal grandfather and my father were teachers. My grandfather, Isaac Newton Roland, taught in a private high school in the rural community of Essary Springs, about seventy-five miles south of Maury City. According to all available accounts, he was a splendid instructor. During World War II, when I was stationed at a camp in Texas, I met an elderly man at church one Sunday. When we were introduced, he asked, “Are you akin to Professor I. N. Roland?” I explained the relationship. He revealed that he had been a pupil of my grandfather’s in the Essary Springs school. Upon learning later that I planned to become a teacher after the war, he bestowed upon me this blessing: “I hope you will be as great a teacher as your grandfather was.”

My grandfather met and married a student in the school, Mary Margaret Nelms, who became my grandmother. She was a tall and stately woman, and she held a strong sense of personal rectitude.

My father, Clifford Paul Roland, was the first of three children, all boys, born to the I. N. Rolands. He was born July 4, 1893. He was a healthy, handsome child. A photograph made when he was about two gives him a decidedly serious look. He would grow up to be a handsome man; a girlfriend of mine once told me that she and her friends agreed that none of my father’s sons was as handsome as he. Somewhat crestfallen, I concurred. He was a generally serious and reserved man, but with a strong sense of humor and a deep love of life. He was highly intelligent and especially gifted in mathematics, and he was a conscientious student in all fields of learning. He was also a good athlete, particularly in basketball and baseball.

My maternal grandfather was Burton Paysinger. Born a few years before the Civil War, he retained fearful childhood memories of the conflict. He received only about two years of formal education, but this was sufficient to ground him far more thoroughly in reading, writing, and ciphering than are most high school graduates today. He acquired a lifelong love of words and was a natural orator and storyteller. He was fiery and impulsive. He was a cotton farmer and he served as a magistrate on the county court. He enjoyed whiskey and chewing tobacco.

My maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Josephine Hurley. She was petite and, from my earliest memories of her, was quite hunched in the shoulders. She was quick of mind and tongue, and was said to have been a pretty girl and a light-footed dancer in her youth. We grandchildren called our Paysinger grandparents Ma and Pa because an older cousin had done so.

My mother, Grace Pearl Paysinger, was three years younger than my father. In her, I could see strong elements of both of her parents. She was pretty, bright, impulsive, and fiery. When she was about nine years old, the Paysingers sold their farm in McNairy County, Tennessee, and moved to Essary Springs in order that the children could attend the private school that was now being run by my grandfather Roland. My mother was a fast learner and soon caught up with all the pupils who had been ahead of her in her grade in school.

She first saw my father shortly after moving to Essary Springs. As she later put it, in meeting him she met her Waterloo. Apparently, they fell in love at first sight; they were married in 1916 after a long courtship. When my father walked down into the field where Pa Paysinger was plowing and asked for my mother’s hand, Pa’s only words were, “Well, Clifford, she’s got a mighty high temper.” The wedding was something of an early flower-child affair. Because one of my mother’s sisters was seriously ill, the event could not take place in her home; instead, they met the presiding official by the roadside under a large oak tree where the ceremony occurred.

My father had attended a private college by the name of The National Teachers’ Normal and Business College in the town of Henderson, Tennessee, which was on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad about thirty-five miles northeast of Essary Springs. He had been teaching school for two or three years in the village of Sardis, Tennessee, near the Tennessee River. He now accepted a position as co-principal of the high school in Maury City, about forty miles northwest of Henderson. He also coached the school’s various athletics teams. My parents moved to Maury City shortly after their marriage. I was born there two years later; our family lived there until I was three.

My memories of life in Maury City are, of course, too dim to be reliable. According to community lore, one of the more sensational of these experiences occurred when I was an infant too young to remember it consciously. The story is that a teenaged girl engaged by my mother to babysit me had great difficulty stopping me from squalling. Finally, in desperation, she resorted to what the army would call a field expedient; she bared one breast and put me to it. I quieted instantly and was soon fast asleep. The experience may have affected me for life.

I do recall faintly some of the especially happy or especially painful episodes of my life there. For example: my parents playing the card game of Rook or eating homemade ice cream or watermelon with their friends, all the while engaged in laughter and lighthearted conversation; or an occasion when I inadvisably sampled the fiery-hot red peppers being grown in my mother’s garden by the porch, an experience I was wise enough not to repeat.

In 1921 my family, which now included another son, Grady Paul, moved to Henderson, where my father had accepted a position on the faculty of Freed-Hardeman Junior College, the successor to The National Teachers’ Normal and Business College. He would remain at Freed-Hardeman for the rest of his career. He retired from his service there on July 4, 1983, his ninetieth birthday. The school was affiliated with the Church of Christ. Most of the faculty were ministers in the church as well as teachers in the school, and in deciding to come there he decided also to enter the ministry.

My father’s new position on the Freed-Hardeman faculty plus his role as a Church of Christ minister altered sharply the social and religious ambience surrounding the family. The college held a rather sternly puritanical outlook on life; it frowned on games of cards and on “mixed bathing,” the term it applied to aquatic activities in which males and females swam together. Dancing was considered to be an unmitigated sin, one that would lead to horrendous lasciviousness. No longer did my parents engage in Rook parties; nor did they engage in any other social affairs except those related to the school, church, or family. The demands of the ministry caused my father to give up coaching. These restrictions and constraints would bear heavily on me as I grew older.

I went through the usual experiences of a young child in a small southern town of that era. I survived the severe childhood diseases that were popularly known as whooping cough and red measles, and the relatively mild diseases known as chicken pox and German measles. I had the best medical attention available at the time, but the best could be taxing. It included, for example, an annual purging. Every spring, our family physician would prescribe a “round of calomel to clear out the system,” which had to be followed by a dose of castor oil. This procedure did indeed clear out the system! This occurred whether or not there were any symptoms that would have justified the ordeal, which seemed to me to be worse than any condition it might have cured or averted. All members of my family also faithfully took quinine to ward off malaria.

In Henderson, the Roland family grew with the addition of a daughter, Margaret Josephine (namesake of both grandmothers), Hall Carmack, and Isaac Nelms. I loved my siblings but seemed to be compelled to bedevil the two of them nearest my age. I once got Josephine (Jo for short) up on top of the house by way of a ladder that someone had carelessly left in place. I was unable to get her down, and my parents were not immediately available. Fortunately, a passing college student rescued her.

I constantly provoked fights with Paul. I also led him into all sorts of mischief. The very first words of every Henderson acquaintance of mine when encountered in later years were: “You and Paul were the worst kids I ever knew.” In my maturity I have come to believe that jealousy was the cause of my picking on Paul. He had replaced me as the baby of the family. Also, he was more attractive than I. He possessed a round face with cheeks like big red apples; my face was sharp and pale by comparison. Invariably, some of the first words spoken when the family visited relatives were: “Isn’t Paul cute?” Then, turning to me, “I do declare. Charles looks a little peaked, doesn’t he?”

Josephine, five years my junior, posed a different kind of threat to my security. She was a girl. I soon began to derive great pleasure out of teasing her. She was a perfect target because she reacted so predictably and in a manner so gratifying to me. I honed my teasing talents to the point that I could send her screeching out of the room merely with a gesture or a knowing glance in her direction. I once appropriated her menu for a party she was planning for herself and her girlfriends. The menu called for a dime’s worth of candy and seventeen glasses of cocoa-malt, a favorite family beverage that was thought to possess marvelous health-promoting qualities. The mention of that menu fifty years later would send her into blushes and gales of embarrassed laughter.

I entered the Freed-Hardeman elementary school at age five. For a long time afterward, I believed my parents started me early because of my precocity. After I became a parent, I began to suspect they were motivated at least in part by the need to get me out of the house for a while each day. Unquestionably, they had good cause for wanting to do this.

I was definitely not a good pupil. There is little doubt that today I would be diagnosed as being hyperactive; I had certain twitches and motions that may have been symptoms of what is now identified as Tourette’s syndrome. To say that I had an attention deficit would be a gross understatement; I had an attention void. In all probability, I would today be put on medication. I was indescribably bored with most of my classes, notwithstanding that my teacher was a quite pretty young woman who was just out of college and who aroused in me all sorts of unidentifiable sensations.

I was unable, or unwilling, to memorize the information required by the tests. Arithmetic was a profound mystery to me. My lack of aptitude in the field is still a mystery to me, since both of my parents and all of my siblings were especially good in it. Fortunately, reading came easy for me. Also, both my teacher and my classmates gave me high marks for my ability as a narrator or raconteur, though these activities often got me into trouble for talking when I should have been silent.

Girls presented a serious distraction. They seemed to be the repositories of all beauty and brains. The ancient saying that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, and little boys of snaps and snails and puppy dog tails, I accepted as eternal verities. The girls came to school in immaculate dresses and shiny patent-leather shoes, their hair done in flawless braids or curls. The contrast between their appearance and mine was too painful for contemplation. One day while in the first grade I slipped up on a golden-haired little angel and stole a kiss; she ran home to her mother in tears. I felt like the troll who had emerged from under the bridge.

The intellectual contrast was as striking as the physical one. The little girls almost always got their tests back with big red 100s marked on them. They were downcast when they received a 99. If I had received a grade that high I would have known somebody had shuffled the papers.

Corporal punishment, both at home and in school, was a prevalent condition of growing up when I was young. In my early years my parents whipped with switches; later, my father whipped with his belt. There were periods when I was whipped at least once a day, some days, more than once. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was the accepted wisdom in parenting. Strangely, despite the present view that such practice constitutes child abuse and inflicts permanent psychological trauma, I never felt abused, ceased to love my parents, never questioned their love for me. Whether the experience crushed or otherwise dismembered my personality, I leave to others. How much effect the punishment had on my behavior at the time is debatable.

In addition to the whippings at home, I was also whipped quite often in school. Yet I continued to misbehave regularly both places. When I was a teenager I received lashings at school hard enough to leave stripes that were clearly visible across my back for days when I was swimming with my cohorts. I wore the stripes as proudly as an army sergeant wears those on his chevron.

I was wounded by one of Cupid’s arrows while in my early teens. My first actual romantic encounter occurred in the unlikely environs of the Freed-Hardeman College tennis courts. I found myself by accident in close proximity to a charming, sloe-eyed young brunette of about my own age. Before I knew it, we were embracing, kissing. To my utter bewilderment, she suddenly disengaged and fled, leaving me in a state of suspended animation.

Notwithstanding the frequency of domestic punishments, I can see that I was blessed with a secure and bounteous home. I never wanted for nourishing food or comfortable clothing and housing. There were always toys and other gifts at Christmas. This was possible during the Great Depression of the early thirties because Freed-Hardeman College resorted to barter in lieu of nonexistent cash; the faculty accepted goods and produce from parents in payment of their children’s tuition fees. Also, in our home there was always parental love, albeit of a painful application on countless occasions.

Speaking of Christmas, in the Church of Christ it was an altogether secular occasion. We shot fireworks on Christmas the way most Americans elsewhere shot them on the Fourth of July. The bombardment began weeks in advance and gradually reached fortissimo on Christmas Day. By dawn that morning the town of Henderson sounded somewhat like the battle of Gettysburg.

In spite of my unimpressive performance in school, I managed to acquire an acceptable knowledge of the basics in education. My formal schooling was immensely reinforced by reading and by a certain amount of travel. When I was seven or eight my parents purchased a second-hand set of the youths’ encyclopedia named The Book of Knowledge. Its many volumes (thirty, as I recall) contained snippets of almost every imaginable branch of literature and learning. Through the years I may have read every word of the entire work.

I also had ready access to a set of world classics that my father owned and kept in his home library. They were published in separate little volumes. Admittedly, they were a bit mature for me, but I read many of them anyway, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Such of their expressions as “rosy-fingered dawn” and “wine-dark sea” struck a responsive chord in me. I read with intense satisfaction how the suitors of the wife of the absent and wandering Ulysses, pretending to be Ulysses, failed the test of identity to which they were subjected. Only Ulysses could draw the bow of Ulysses.

Another important source of my intellectual development lay in certain of the popular novels of the time. I devoured the novels of Zane Grey telling of the exploits of bold western riders and the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs with their story of a muscular young superman who was reared by the great anthropoid apes of Africa.

Unquestionably, the supreme literary influence on my youth was the King James Bible, in which I did a considerable amount of obligatory reading, but which came to me primarily through quotations—innumerable, reiterated quotations in sermons, Sunday school classes, and Freed-Hardeman’s compulsory daily chapel exercises. After almost eight decades many of these striking passages still ring in my mind: “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork”; “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet . . . Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

An unintended enhancement in my early formal education—a piece of serendipity—was the result of the presence in the Freed-Hardeman elementary and high school of a number of pupils from a wide portion of the nation, including such faraway and exotic regions as Florida, Illinois, and Texas, as well as such closer places as the cities of Nashville and Memphis. What I did not understand at the time but have come to believe is that at least some of them were there to receive a discipline that their parents were unable or unwilling to exercise at home. In other words, Freed-Hardeman served them somewhat as a reform school. Hence, among them were a number of previously undisciplined and highly mischievous (if not miscreant) boys and girls. They lived in the college dormitories, thus further developing their questionable knowledge and skills by contact with the older residents. All of this gave the Freed-Hardeman lower schools an extraordinary degree of versatility, energy, and color.

I profited immensely from these associations, though my parents would have been horrified by a lot of what I was learning. The most memorable of these youthful boarding pupils was a boy named Baskin Fuller (nicknamed Bosey) from Florida. Bosey was four or five years older than I. He was handsome, bright, articulate, and altogether charming; he probably grew up to be a highl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Charles P. Roland, Historian of the Civil War and the American South
• Part One: The Man, The Soldier, The Historian
• Part Two: Secession and the Civil War
• Part Three: Civil War Leadership
• Part Four: The South in Fact and in Myth
• Copyrights and Permissions
• Index