Week One: "The Cause"

Week one is over, and we're moving into week two. So I thought I'd take a moment and reflect on the readings/thrust of the seminar so far.

The staff of the Georgia Historical Society put together the seminar, and you can tell that they are a group of people who deal with the "Lost Cause" mentality on a fairly regular basis.

GHS staff leading the charge...

During the first week, we read a book on Civil War soldiers' motivations for fighting, and some readings that explored the way that the war has become a "cause" for folks since it ended. It was interesting to think about what contemporaries thought of the conflict at the time, even as we examined what people bring to the table now.

Grave marker, Georgia

The Civil War is alive and well in the south, in the monuments that enshrine it, in the language that people use to discuss people from different regions, and in the hearts of many.

Fort Fisher Memorial, North Carolina

It's an axiom, and yet it does seem true that people who live outside of the ex-Confederacy only become Yankees when they cross into an ex-Confederate state. I have spent most of my U.S. life south of the Mason Dixon line, but I had never heard someone call anyone a Yankee until I moved to Wilmington, one of the supposed bastions of ex-Confederate North Carolina.

There's a huge disjunction between how professional historians think about the war, and how the public thinks about the conflict. It's hard not to get discouraged by that gaping chasm.

Even a brief look at the sources suggests that despite all today's talk about state's rights as somehow being distinct from the issue of slavery, people at the time knew what the war was about.

North Carolina's Governor John Ellis pointed to slavery as the big divisive issue in November 1860:

The great body of the people of the northern and southern states entertain diametrically opposite opinions upon the subject of African slavery. The former, that it is a social and political evila nd a sin; the latter that it is a system of labor eminently well adapted to our cliamte and soil, right and proper within itself, and that so far from being a sin, its establishemnt among us is on of the providences of God for civilizing and christianizing that benighted race.

Despite many statements along these lines, we're still hard pressed to convince certain constituences that slavery was a primary cause of the war.

I wish we could all collectively move past this argument, though. Civil War stories are so much more interesting (at least to me) if we include complexities, contingencies, and contradictions. Northerners were fighting a war against slavery, and were often racists. There were unionists in the south who argued against secession, yet many of them did so because they though the union would maintain the slave system. Both south and north evoked the American Revolution as "evidence" that they were on the right side.

Yet as long as, when we talk about the south, we are really only talking about white male southerners, we'll continue to ignore most of the people who lived in the south, and continue to have the same tired arguments, where no one listens, and no one learns anything new.

So, although I feel like I'm channeling Carrie Bradshaw (without the manolo blahniks), I have to ask:

If we make up our minds without opening our minds, are we doomed to repeat the past?

∞∞∞∞∞