In Defense of His Confederate Pride

Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle.

The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross—better known as the rebel flag.

Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master’s degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather’s stories about serving the South in the “War Between the States.”

His grandfather’s casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt.

Winbush is also black.

“You’ve never seen nothing like me, have you?”

* * *

Winbush’s nondescript white brick house near Kissimmee’s quaint downtown is cluttered with the mess of a life spent hoarding history.

Under the glass of his coffee table lie family photos, all of smiling black people. On top sits Ebony magazine.

Winbush is retired and a widower who keeps a strict schedule of household chores, family visits and Confederate events. He often eats at Fat Boy’s Barbecue, where his Sons of Confederate Veterans camp meets.

Winbush’s words could come from the mouth of any white son of a Confederate veteran. They subscribe to a sort of religion about the war, a different version than mainstream America.

The tenets, repeated endlessly by loyalists:

The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.

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Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states’ rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.

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At one speech, Winbush stood in front of the square battle flag that draped his grandfather’s coffin, retelling the stories he has told so many times that the words emerge in identical iterations.

At the end of his talk, he held the microphone to a stereo and played a song by the Rebelaires, with a sorrowful, bluesy rhythm: “You may not believe me, but things was just that way. Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray.”

Once other Confederates recognize that his story is real, they love him. Opponents often attack white Confederates as ignorant or racist. Winbush is harder to dismiss. If nothing else, the naysayers are more willing to listen.

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* * *

Winbush’s views were once more widespread, even in the land of theme parks and turnpikes.

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High school teachers don’t preach the righteousness of the South. And historians, for the most part, agree that the Civil War was about slavery, undermining the standard neo-Confederate argument.

But Confederate loyalists are digging in. Winbush considers the South his homeland. And his family history, because it’s rarer than that of white Confederates, is in danger of extinction.

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Slowly, in his deep, rough voice, Winbush tells the story of a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a teenager with the sons of his master.

“They grew up together,” Winbush says.

At first his grandfather cooked and looked out for the others, but later he saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and plantation owner.

At Shiloh, a two-day battle in 1862 in which more than 23,000 American men were killed or wounded, the Confederate Army needed a chaplain. Louis Nelson couldn’t read or write, but he had memorized the King James Bible.

He stayed on as chaplain for the next four campaigns, leading services for both Confederate and Union soldiers, before they headed back to the battlefield.

He also foraged for food. One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.

“When you don’t have anything else, mule meat tastes pretty good,” he would tell his grandson.

Some topics even the loquacious grandfather considered off limits. He wouldn’t talk about the Union siege of Vicksburg, a bloody battle that captured an important Mississippi River port and effectively split the South.

After the war, he lived as a free man on the James Oldham plantation for 12 more years. Then he became a plasterer, traveling the South to work on houses.

Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions, wearing a woolly gray uniform that Winbush still has.In photos, he stands next to two white men who accompanied him to soldiers’ reunions until they were old men. Through the sepia gleams a dignity earned on the battlefield.

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His grandfather died in 1934 at the age of 88. The local paper ran an obituary that called him a “darky.” Winbush is proud that his grandfather’s death was marked at all.

* * *

Winbush grew up in the house his grandfather built in 1908, a two-story yellow structure with a wraparound porch in Ripley, Tenn. The Oldham plantation, where his grandfather was a slave, provided the wood in recognition of his loyalty to the family.

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Winbush moved to Florida in 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated school desegregation. Like many around the country, Osceola County schools remained segregated for several more years.

He didn’t mind the divide because he felt both black and white students got a better education by not being able to use racial conflict as an excuse. When the superintendent, a friend of his, decided it was time to integrate in the late 1960s, Winbush agreed. The time had come, he thought, when people could accept the change.

Winbush thinks that people will get along if they know each other. He says he never suffered any blatant racism. The small Southern towns he lived in were familiar and accepting.

He remembers the “I Have A Dream” speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He respects King but disagrees with his reverence for Lincoln.

Winbush wasn’t moved by the speech. King was just speaking the truth, he says, but it didn’t change the daily reality of blacks.

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Winbush’s convictions about the war lay dormant until 1991, when the NAACP began an all-out campaign against the Confederate flag, saying it was a symbol of hatred. It vowed to have it removed from public places by the end of the decade.

Winbush saw it differently, and he was retiring. He no longer worried about what some “Yankee boss” would think.

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He joined the Sons and started speaking at their events. He twice appeared before the Virginia Legislature to dissuade them from taking down the flag. He collects clippings of newspaper stories written about his speeches. One shows him posing in front of a statute of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

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* * *

Winbush is the last direct link to his grandfather, someone who heard the stories firsthand and felt the passion.

He feels the legacy of Confederate soldiers like his grandfather won’t survive unless the history is passed within families, from one generation to the next.

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