John Carter as a Confederate Soldier, some welcome context! #JohnCarter

Abraham Sherman is one of those awesome contributors passionnate about Edgar Rice Burroughs who regularly writes posts on the Facebook pages dedicated to the writer. He recently wrote a contribution that I found very interesting, about the fact that the author made a Confederate soldier as his hero, which was quite surprising since his own father was an Union officer during the American Civil War. Did that mean that John Carter himself was favorable to slavery?

If the Andrew Stanton movie, God bless him, doesn't ignore this fact, and doesn't condemn his hero for it, the video game to come chooses to make John Carter a World War II soldier, a choice evidently more politically correct.

Regarding the American Civil War, we often tend to schematize the conflict, which had mostly political roots, to "those villain slavers from the South against those nice Northern progressists". Reality was without a doubt more nuanced than that.

With the autorization of Abraham Sherman, here his his post from the "John Carter of Mars & All ERB Gaming Group":

"There were also good men in the South, and the heroes in ERB's stories were the opposite of racist.

We should be careful to remember that the Southern Gentleman isn't CSA-specific, and is more than a trope in fiction. It existed as a social class both before and after the Civil War. Individuals within that class were not necessarily pro-slavery or pro-CSA. Robert E. Lee was one of the most famous examples, and he nearly agreed to fight for the North. There were wealthy, black, slave-owning members of this social class. It wasn't a pigeonhole.

It is meaningful that John Carter fought for Virginia, which although it contained the CSA capitol of Richmond, was not a deep-South state heavily steeped in slave-owning culture. Part of Washington, D.C. is on the south side of the Potomac, and there was (and still is) a ready exchange of cultures across those waters. Many people in Maryland speak with a slight Southern accent, and a lot of Northern industry spills over into Virginia. This exchange has been the case since at least the time of George Washington.

Even at the time of the Civil War, being from Virginia did not immediately mean that a person supported slavery, or even that they would automatically support the CSA. Many people fought for the CSA not because they wanted to preserve slavery (only 1% of Southerners owned slaves), but because the political ruling class had decided to take the South in that direction, and they exploited the will of the average person to rally in support of his home state, for good or ill. This enacted a terrible price on the average Southerner.

A Southern Gentleman and a Captain in the Confederate Cavalry was not by default a racist. He may have fought only because he felt it necessary to protect his family during a conflict which was foisted on the region by ruling elites. We should not mistake Southern fervor for states rights and a nation of their own as a rallying cry in support of racism. It wasn't, for the vast majority of Southerners. The CSA was misguided in several ways, support for slavery being by far the worst, but the Civil War was NOT "the war against Southern racism" that some of the current textbooks like to claim it was. The public opinion narrative regarding these issues has been greatly simplified for the sake of modern political expediency - namely, expediency against modern Southern Republicans (the irony being that the CSA was Democrat-run).

ERB's dad was a Union officer, so we can be fairly certain that ERB himself was not a sympathizer with the worst intentions of the CSA. Nor would ERB have created a heroic character with those sympathies. The author who wrote "The Black Man's Burden" in refutation of Kipling's infamous screed was not interested in race-based subjugation. ERB wrote many anti-racist messages into his novels, and never once claimed that one's skin color says anything at all about one's inherent humanity.

Due to the nature of melanin, every one of us is some shade of brown. Playing political football with "race" is incredibly silly and is a blatantly manipulative exploitation waged against minority individuals via carefully cultivated insecurities. The purposeful promulgation of race-related inferiority and victim mentalities is today's ideological plantation.

I suspect that ERB made John Carter a Southern officer because of the Southern Gentleman code of chivalry (which never included pretending that slavery was honorable), and perhaps as a reconciliation gesture intended to calm anti-South sentiments and help heal the national divide. And, like you mentioned, it made Carter something like the era's equivalent of an American ronin.

If the celebration of the Southern Gentleman is such a non-issue in the books, and the trope itself was not inherently problematic, why bother retconning it? Why treat nobly-portrayed former Confederates as radioactive? People can tell the difference between a good man from a certain region and the bad men who held the worst ideas in that region at the same point in history. Today's political narratives are not so important that we must use broad brushes to demonize good ideals and good people, are they?

"Twenty-two years before I had been cast, naked and a stranger, into this strange and savage world. The hand of every race and nation was raised in continual strife and warring against the men of every other land and color. Today, by the might of my sword and the loyalty of the friends my sword had made for me, black man and white, red man and green rubbed shoulders in peace and good-fellowship. All the nations of Barsoom were not yet as one, but a great stride forward toward that goal had been taken, and now if I could but cement the fierce yellow race into this solidarity of nations I should feel that I had rounded out a great lifework, and repaid to Mars at least a portion of the immense debt of gratitude I owed her for having given me my Dejah Thoris." - John Carter (a 'Jasoomian Savior' who happened to be white, on a planet where the white race was the most consistently villainous)"

"Southerners were to the Confederacy what Germans were to Nazi Germany. We can disparage all the people in a region during a dark period of history, and drag out guilt to future generations, or we can be decent human beings and discern between persons based solely on their individual personal character and individual choices. Most Southerners fought for the South, not for the worst elements of the Confederacy, in much the same way that 2/3 of the US military is conservative and opposes abortion, yet fights for America."

Well written Abraham! :)

Let's add for the sake of complecy that is the fictive Burroughs family introduced in A Princess of Mars indeed posess slaves (it's even specified that even them adored John Carter when he came to visit), John Carter himself doesn't have slaves. He has slaves on Barsoom, but over there "slavery" is very special, because like every cultural aspect as imagined by Burroughs, it's based above all things on honor. You can thus become a temporary slave if your nation was vanquished in war, to buy back the honor of this nation, or simply to pay back a debt, knowing that a few years of "slavery" means nothing for people that, unless prematurely killed in combat, can live up to a thousand years. It's also specified that it's perfectly legal for a slave to kill his owner if this owner abuse his power!