One Hundred and Fifty years ago our nation was engaged in its most defining event – a great Civil War. A war that disrupted the country for four years and cost 600,000 lives (by todays population a proportion that would equal ten million), and measureless destruction. This week is the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Confederacy and the swearing in of Jefferson Davis as provisional President.
In the early 1960s in the midst of the Civil Rights movement that culminated in 1964/65 with the passage of the Public Accommodations Act and the Voting Rights Act (joined in 1968 with an Anti Discrimination in Housing Law) the nation also celebrated the Centennial of the Civil War. There were reenactments of every battle (I observed one of a small battle in Georgia) but less attention was paid to the non- military events of the conflict.
The sesquicentennial of the Civil War has apparently, at least among unreconstructed southerners, triggered a desire to celebrate every event - particularly political. South Carolinians celebrated the ill-fated secession of that state as if it were something that was both constitutional and successful - it was neither.
The great debate about what caused the Civil War and why it was fought rages among pseudo-historians. If one reads the debates of the secession conventions and the broadsides written before secession it is clear to those who will see that slavery caused the Civil War - to be more precise the desire of the southern slavocracy and ruling economic interests to assure the continuation of their right to own slaves, and their desire to expand the area open to slavery to include the territories acquired from Mexico.(some even dreamed of seizing Cuba and other areas to the south and adding them to the slave portion of the US. This imperialistic desire did not die overnight. As a youngster visiting in Georgia I read a local newspaper that editorialized upon the admission of Hawaii as a state in 1959 that now it was time to complete Manifest Destiny and acquire Cuba and Central America.)
Those who initiated secession to assure the continuance of slavery needed somehow to gain the support of the majority of the white population of the south - whites who did not own slaves. And so they wrapped the banner of state’s rights and southern independence around their movement. While slavery caused the Civil War, it is true that most Southerners thought they fought for their independence. My great great grandfather fought for the confederacy as did two of my great great great grandfathers. They did not own slaves nor were they from slave owning families. They lived in northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia - unionist regions of the south. They believed they were fighting for southern independence.
This belief was supported by the official federal position during the first two years of the war that the North was fighting only to preserve the union. That was Lincoln’s public position. Not until late 1862 and Jan 1863 did the President declare as the war aim of the North the eradication of slavery. My great great great grandfather, William Kelly, lived in eastern Tennessee and he fought in the union forces for the union.
Americans truly were divided brother against brother - in fact in my own Wilson family brothers fought on different sides.
So as we enter this four year period of sesquicentennial anniversaries should we be celebrating this cruel war and its 600,000 deaths? To CELEBRATE is “publicly honor or praise an important occasion” and implies approval. I suggest that the only thing about the Civil War to celebrate is the abolition of slavery, the great stain upon the American mosaic and the cruel and inhuman practice that once pervaded our country. There is much of our Civil War history that we should COMMEMORATE. To commemorate is to “act to honor the memory of an event or person”.
While nostalgic southerners, spurred on by todays conservative Republicans, yearn for the “good old days” and celebrate battles and the events of the lost cause we should commemorate those events in our history that helped build the American nation. Let us commemorate Lincoln’s two inaugurations; let us remember Antietam and Gettysburg as great battles that saved the Union. Let us celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation that made whole the promises of the Declaration of Independence
Most of all let us be guided by the words of Abraham Lincoln when he dedicated the national cemetery at Gettysburg and declared that those who died there had died so: that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom … .