By Lee A. Daniels

Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell got the wrong month this past week when he proclaimed April Confederate History Month.

The right month to place even greater emphasis on studying the Confederacy is March.

But, his “error” is something historian Barbara W. Tuchman would have understood. In her 1981 book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, she wrote that “Leaving things out because they do not fit is writing fiction, not history.”

In that regard, Confederate sympathizers have been writing fiction about what the Confederacy stood for ever since Robert E. Lee surrendered to U.S.Grant at Appomattox, Virginia April 9, 1865. Governor McDonnell’s choosing the wrong month was as deliberate as his initial omission of any reference to Virginia having been a slave state; and to the Confederacy having fought the war in order to maintain slavery, and as his implying that Virginia was then an all-white state, when in fact in 1860 blacks, both enslaved and free, comprised nearly half of its population.

But then, the contortions of the Republican Governor’s original proclamation are entirely consistent with the record of racially-coded politics the erstwhile “Party of Lincoln” has employed for the last four decades.

It has not been Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party for some time – not since the mass-action phase of the Civil Rights Movement helped shatter the depiction of the Confederacy as a heroic enterprise of benevolent whites fighting bravely for their “freedom.” That falsehood had distorted the consideration of the Civil War in school history texts, Hollywood films and the mainstream media for nearly a century. As Gov. McDonnell’s action proves, Confederate sympathizers have continued to try to reconstruct a gauzy mint-julep–on-the-veranda fiction about what their beloved Eden stood for.

They becloud the atmosphere with pious incantations of the “honor” and “courage” and “sacrifice” Confederate soldiers endured [link to proclamation coming] – as if individual soldiers’ bravery can cover up and purify fighting for an evil cause.

But such perfumed language can’t conceal the brutal facts about the human suffering that was the central characteristic of the South’s “peculiar institution.” Gene Dattel’s new book, Cotton and Race In The Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power, is just the latest to show in powerful detail that the white South was completely dependent on cotton – and thus, Negro slavery – for its economic well-being and psychological sense of itself as a master race.

For example, the facts are clear that, contrary to one facet of the current neo-Confederate myth, the white South wasn’t going to stop being a slave society. One of the many facts never mentioned by the Confederate sympathizers underscores that: that the 1860 census found the number of black slaves had increased as the century deepened. By 1860, there were 4.4 million people of African descent in the U.S.; 3.95 million of them, or 89 percent were enslaved in the South.

But one need only cite two events to prove what a fiction the Romance of the Confederacy is. Both occurred in March 1861.

In his speech, “Slavery, the Cornerstone of the Confederacy,” given at Savannah, Georgia. on March 21, 1861, Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice-president, declared: “The prevailing ideas entertained by Thomas Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the (United States) were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature, that it was wrong in principle, social (sic), morally and politically.”

In contrast, Stephens went on to say, “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.”

That Stephens accurately stated the Confederacy’s guiding principle is confirmed by the breakaway region’s blueprint for nationhood: the Confederate Constitution of 1861. That brief, thoroughly utilitarian document’s five “negro (sic) slavery” clauses leave no doubt that the maintenance and expansion of Slavery was the entire purpose of the Confederacy.

I’ve always believed I understood perfectly why today’s Confederate sympathizers never acknowledge the existence of the rebel region’s founding document or its vice-president’s declaration of its fundamental beliefs.

Perhaps, however, I’ve been too cynical.

Perhaps now that we’ve cleared up which month is the true Confederate History Month, those Confederate sympathizers who declare their devotion to it is about “heritage, not hate” will petition officials in Virginia and elsewhere to acknowledge the month that saw the real birth of the Confederacy — March.

But I wouldn’t bet you one mint julep they will.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.