I finished the Open Yale Course on The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 today. From the last of the 27 lectures, Legacies of the Civil War:
Everything in history has a legacy. We use the term all the time, the legacies of this; the legacies of that; the legacies of that event; what are the legacies of World War Two? What are the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement? But what is a legacy? … Let me attempt a definition… It can be simply another word for historical memory, of how we remember things, and then how we use them. It always carries some current, present, and often political meaning. If you use the term legacy for something, it probably has a current political stake. Reconstruction, in our history, was an ongoing referendum on the meaning and legacies of slavery in the Civil War. And so much of our racial history, our constitutional history, our political history, ever since Reconstruction, has been a referendum on the meaning and memory of Reconstruction. Was there a reconciliation in the wake of these events, of sections, of states, of soldiers, of the political class, or of masters and slaves, blacks and whites? Who got reconciled and who didn’t? […]
Robert Penn Warren, wrote a little essay in 1961 called The Legacy of the Civil War. He wrote it for Life magazine. It was later published as a book. In that book, trying to capture what the meaning of the Civil War was in American culture 100 years after, Penn Warren said that “somewhere in their bones”–and I quote him–“most Americans have a storehouse of lessons drawn from the Civil War.” Now exactly what those lessons should be has been, I think, the most contested question in America’s historical memory, over and over again, at least since 1865 and probably even since 1863, when the war underwent a revolution. “Among all the possible lessons of our Civil War,” wrote Robert Penn Warren, “is the realization”–his words–“that slavery looms up mountainously in the story and cannot be talked away.” Our culture has spent nearly now a century and a half, and it is still at it, of talking away the place of slavery in this event and its place in the aftermath. “When one is happy in forgetfulness,” said Penn Warren, “facts get forgotten. […]
But if one thing in particular happened to the memory of the Civil War, it found it its way eventually into a broad consensus, in the broader national culture–this was never unanimous of course–but in the broader national culture that somehow, in this war, in this Armageddon, in this blood-letting, [in a war that killed 620,000 people and maimed about 1.2 million, and transformed the society] everybody had been right and nobody had been wrong. You want to reconcile a country that’s had a horrifying civil war, how do you do it? Well, you start building thousands upon thousands of monuments. You start having soldier reunions…. Cure the hatreds of war by bringing the warriors together, because they have a mutuality of experience. And there was, of course, no lack of honor at Appomattox, on either side.
But outside of all that pathos, that understanding, that sentiment that Americans had bought into by the millions, there was, of course, another whole story going on, out in American culture and in national memory. In 1912, the NAACP counted seventy-two lynchings, in America; about ninety percent of whom were African-Americans. By 1912, when that book was published, the entire Jim Crow legal system and all of its absurdities was fully in place, roughly by about 1910, across the South and in some of the border states, and to some extent even in the North. An erasure of cultural, historical, mnemonic erasure, had been going on for three, four and five decades, of emancipation, from the national narrative of what this war had even ever been about. That process led the great black scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois–same year, 1912–in the Crisis magazine, the journal of NAACP, to conclude, as he put it, “This country has had its appetite for facts on the Civil War and the Negro problem spoiled by sweets.” They’d eaten too much candy.
The course was taught by David W. Blight, Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (for which he received the Bancroft, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass prizes), and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War. Here’s how he concludes the course:
I don’t know if you’ve read it but at the very end of Barack Obama’s race speech [link] I’m talking about Obama now as a historian, not as a candidate… it’s the story of a young twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia, who is his campaign manager in Florence, South Carolina. And he remembered the story of when he, during the South Carolina primary, he was doing an event in Florence, South Carolina, and he meets Ashley and Ashley tells him her story. And that story is, in brief, that she grew up with a single mother, poor, a poor white girl in the South. At age about ten her mother got cancer, lost her job… But somehow as she got older she got interested in politics. Now that’s a white, lower working-class, poor, southern girl who had every right to be in that group Obama had described earlier, who are the whites in America with a lot of resentment of all the racial changes in America. Instead she becomes his campaign manager, and she put together this whole gathering in Florence, in some, I don’t know, church hall or wherever they were meeting; mostly black folk.
And then Obama describes how everybody in the room had to go around and say why they were there, or what issue they were there for. And he says, with quite some directness, that most people did what most people do, they name a single issue; it’s about them, it’s about us, right? It’s not about the common good, it’s about us… And they finally come around to an old back man who’s sitting there, kind of at the end of the aisle, and he’s asked, “So why are you here?” Obama doesn’t even name him. He says, “I’m just here because Ashley brought me here. I’m only here because of Ashley.” Now Obama says–in effect, he develops at the end of the speech a refrain about not this time, he says; not this time, we’re not going to let race divide us this time. Like Du Bois’ two figures, hating, till their death; and hating, their children’s children live today. Well, here are two children. But note what he’s reversed. We got a young white woman who should’ve been in the resentful white working-class, and an old black man who no doubt grew up in Jim Crow and probably has told story after story of the denigration or destruction of his dignity for the first 45 years of his life. But he’s there because of Ashley. Thank you.
It is my hope that reconciliation can overcome legacies over a beer in the White House tomorrow.