by chadh
The Civil War Isn’t Tragic
[Via Ta-Nehisi Coates : The Atlantic]
We fought for months over this. Here is the result:
In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved–to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people–is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery–chief among them, its flag–still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.
In August, I returned to Gettysburg. My visits to battlefields are always unsettling. Repeatedly, I have dragged my family along, and upon arrival I generally wish that I hadn’t. Nowhere, as a black person, do I feel myself more of a problem than at these places, premised, to varying degrees, on talking around me. But of all the Civil War battlefields I’ve visited, Gettysburg now seems the most honest and forward-looking. The film in the visitor center begins with slavery, putting it at the center of the conflict. And in recent years, the National Park Service has made an effort to recognize an understated historical element of the town–its community of free blacks.
The Confederate army, during its march into Pennsylvania, routinely kidnapped blacks and sold them south. By the time Lee’s legions arrived in Gettysburg, virtually all of the town’s free blacks had hidden or fled. On the morning of July 3, General George Pickett’s division prepared for its legendary charge. Nearby, where the Union forces were gathered, lived Abraham Brien, a free black farmer who rented out a house on his property to Mag Palmer and her family. One evening before the war, two slave-catchers had fallen upon Palmer as she made her way home. (After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, slave-catchers patrolled the North, making little distinction between freeborn blacks and runaways.) They bound her hands, but with help from a passerby, she fought them off, biting off a thumb of one of the hunters.
Faulkner famously wrote of Pickett’s Charge:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863 … and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet … That moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time.
These “Southern boys,” like Catton’s “people,” are all white. But I, standing on Brien’s property, standing where Mag Palmer lived, saw Pickett’s soldiers charging through history, in wild pursuit of their strange birthright–the license to beat and shackle women under the cover of night. That is all of what was “in the balance,” the nostalgic moment’s corrupt and unspeakable core.
This is the conclusion of a really incredible debate. I doubt that I will convince all of you. But I love you guys nonetheless. It was fighting and grappling with you that gave me this. I hope you enjoy. More on this in the coming hours and days.
I enjoy good writing, even if I do not always agree with the author. But TNC , in this work and in his linked discussions leading up to it, provides an important view often left out of much of the mainstream discussion of the Civil War.
He has become a Civil War buff – as is my Dad – and his descriptions of visiting the battlefields is similar to the experience my father has described. He has read many of the same histories I have. So we have a point where we can connect.
And he just about has me convinced – celebrating the Civil War as a victory and not as as tragedy should be something we do not shrink from. It should be a recognition that it does represent, at its core, the ideals of the Enlightenment brought to devastating fruition. These were not just idle theories about how cultures and societies should organize themselves.
We fought one bloody Civil War in the late 18th Century to begin the creation of an Enlightenment society. We fought an even bigger and bloodier war in the mid 19th century bring that Enlightenment society to full birth.
And the consequence of following Enlightenment principles is that EVERYONE’s life gets better – not just a chosen few. Because they change a zero sum game – one that has been played by feudal states and monarchies – into a positive sum game – one played by democracies and republics. And these societies simply prosper compared to the alternative, as they make full use of all of their citizens, not just a chosen few.
The years before the Civil War are rife with battles back and forth trying to deal with these ideals, in a society that very obviously did not follow them. If we think things are difficult today, read any good history – as with TNC, I recommend McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the best single volume history of the times.
We essentially had a police state throughout most of the country, there was open rebellion with free citizens in the North who happened to be black being kidnapped and sold as slaves in the South, while others from the North working to help slaves escape. There were compromises which bartered people’s lives for political favors. They were really horrible times.
Because we really could not live by the very principles we espoused. We really were psychotic and this became a large part of our culture. Yes, it would have been cheaper – in both money and lives – for the North to simply have bought all the South’s slaves and emancipated them. And as I wrote earlier “But hard numbers have a difficult time with many worldviews, particularly the one espoused by Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard. The slaves made her wealthy. Secession would maintain that wealth. How wrong she was.”
TNC provides some great reasons why we should celebrate the millions of people who were set free by the War. He quotes from some of the same material I have to show just how unjust and un-Enlightened so many were during that time – from the Cornerstone Speech to Succession declarations – to arrive at this:
It’s really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.
We should celebrate what we have been able to become because we fought the War.
We fought one of the most brutal wars in history in order to make these Enlightenment principles manifest throughout our country. We demonstrated that, even if the economics demanded it, a slave society could not stand. We demonstrated that, even if the politics demanded it, a slave society could not stand. We demonstrated that, even if a large percentage of Americans demanded it, a slave state could not stand.
Because the very basis of our country – the very Enlightenment principles hardcoded into our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, etc. – demanded that a slave society could not stand.
By ridding ourselves of a slave society, we opened ourselves to fully embodying the Enlightenment principles we strive to match today. It would not be an easy or even march forward. But we, and the world, are the better for it.
It is a great thing we did.
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