February 3, 2011
By Lonnie Bunch
America is a nation in love with its myths. And this is especially true when it comes to the way Americans remember, celebrate and revere the Civil War, a bloody and transformative contest that has been called the "War Between the States," the "Recent Unpleasantness," the "War of Northern Aggression" and the more historically accurate "War of the Rebellion." As a young boy in the 1960s, during the centennial of the war, I remember how myths often trumped truth in the public expression of this national celebration. At the very moment when a movement for civil rights was changing America and a cold war was changing the world, many Americans looked back with nostalgia for a simpler, less complex time when heroic White men fought honorably, found a binding peace and laid the foundation for America's rise to global super power. The hundreds of books, movies, television shows, board games and blue and gray toy soldiers that were created during the centennial all presented an incomp lete picture that obscured as much as it illuminated America's past. Rarely, for example, was the issue of race raised except to confirm that "Lincoln freed the slaves."
As America turns to commemorate the sesquicentennial of this war, it is disappointing that so many of these myths and a-historical distortions still shape the popular understanding of the impact and legacy of the Civil War. Particularly because the past 50 years have seen an impressive and unprecedented outpouring of scholarship that deepened our understanding of Black agency and the intersection of race and war, repositioned women and issues of gender and enhanced our sensitivity to the ambiguities and contradictions that are also part of the meaning and contemporary resonance of the war. Reputable historians continue to debate aspects of this conflict, but now most realize that the Civil War was a watershed that transformed America's notions about education, governmental responsibilities, healthcare, western expansion and the role of technology - not to mention the impact of the emancipation of 4 million enslaved Americans on the nation's sense of self, equality and citizen ship. Yet, in spite of this scholarly creativity there is a legitimate concern that some would prefer to whitewash the sesquicentennial commemorations rather than face the unresolved issues of race, reunion and culpability.
Quite clearly, race and heritage are at the heart of America's inability to find consensus about the Civil War. These issues play out most dramatically over the causation of the war. Many neo-Confederates take great umbrage over the charge that slavery was at the heart of the Civil War. They claim that the war was about states' rights or the South's desire to protect its way of life - its Camelot - from the industrial North. The most zealous Southern apologists protest that slavery itself was such a benign institution that many enslaved African-Americans were willing to defend the Confederacy as members of the rebel army, if the South had so wished. This is wishful thinking at best and ignorance and dishonesty at worst, as historical evidence refutes those claims.
President Abraham Lincoln made clear the central role of slavery in the war when he stated during his second inaugural address that "slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All know that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war." The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, stated that "the proper status of the negro in our civilization was the immediate cause of the late rupture." And during the secession convention in South Carolina immediately after the election of Lincoln, numerous delegates called for secession as the only means the South had to defend slavery. It was not until the end of the war, in 1865, that Southern leaders like Jefferson Davis began to separate slavery from the causes of the war. Without decoupling slavery from the coming end of the war, it would have been more difficult for Southerners to create heroic myths about their defeat. And it would make it harder for today's neo-Confederates to romanticize the Confederacy
if it was clear that thousands died principally to keep 4 million African-Americans enslaved.
Many Americans explain their differing interpretations of the Civil War by pointing to their right to embrace their Southern heritage. Recently, there have been an array of "Confederacy Balls" and "Southern Heritage Galas" in anticipation of the sesquicentennial in places like Charleston, S.C., and Manassas, Va. Confederate flags are unfurled and modern men and women remake themselves as Southern officers and Southern belles, replete with gleaming gray uniforms and swirling gowns. And by the spring of 2011, many battlefields will be clogged with Confederate re-enactors perfecting their rebel yells and heroic infantry charges. I do not begrudge them the need to revel in their heritage, their "lost cause." I would just ask that they embrace the totality of that heritage: that they understand that much of that heritage was based on racism, violence and an inherent unfairness. And that the process of remembering involves embracing hard truths and complex issues.
My hope is that, unlike the centennial of my youth, the impending sesquicentennial will help America embrace a richer, more complex and more diverse Civil War that repositions the African-American experience at the heart of the conflict. By the time the celebrations end in 2015, I expect that Americans will once again honor the thousands who bore the brunt of battle. Yet I hope that we also acknowledge and embrace the more than 200,000 African-Americans who served in an Army and Navy that needed but often did not want them. And that we realize that their service and their sacrifice changed attitudes and provided the way for African-Americans to claim their place in America.
I hope that, as we continue to acknowledge the impact and import of Abraham Lincoln, America realizes that freedom was not given to the 4 million held in bondage. They were not passive recipients of government largess. Rather, African-Americans used the Civil War as a means to demand freedom, to fight for liberty and to expect nothing less than the rights of citizenship. I hope that we have put to rest the notion - the lie - that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War. And that we understand how central slavery was to the economic, cultural, political and religious identity of America. I hope that as we celebrate the reunion of the North and South that America remembers that many of the issues of that conflict are still unresolved. As the great historian Dr. John Hope Franklin often said, "America must learn to tell the unvarnished truth." Let us all hope that with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War comes an America better able to accept and learn from a more t ruthful history.
- Lonnie Bunch is the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. His most recent book, Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on History, Race and Museums, was published in 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment