Members of Company E, Fourth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, pictured at Fort
Lincoln, in Maryland. The regiment, which was organized in Baltimore after the war broke out, lost nearly 300 men. (Library of
Congress)
In my seventh-grade year, my school
took a bus trip from our native Baltimore to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the sanctified epicenter of American tragedy. It was the
mid-’80s, when educators in our inner cities, confronted by the onslaught of
crack, Saturday Night Specials, and teen pregnancy, were calling on all hands
for help—even the hands of the departed.
Preposterous notions abounded. Black
people talked openly of covert plots evidenced by skyrocketing murder rates and
the plague of HIV. Conscious people were quick to glean, from the cascade of
children murdered over Air Jordans, something still darker—the work of warlocks
who would extinguish all hope for our race. The stratagem of these shadow
forces was said to be amnesia: they would have us see no past greatness in
ourselves, and thus no future glory. And so it was thought that a true history,
populated by a sable nobility and punctuated by an ensemble of Negro “firsts,”
might be the curative for black youth who had no aspirations beyond the corner.
The attempt was gallant. It enlisted
every field, from the arts (Phillis Wheatley) to the sciences (Charles Drew).
Each February—known since 1976 as Black History Month—trivia contests rewarded
those who could recall the inventions of Garrett A. Morgan, the words of
Sojourner Truth, or the wizard hands of Daniel Hale Williams. At my middle
school, classes were grouped into teams, each of them named for a hero (or a
“shero,” in the jargon of the time) of our long-suffering, yet magnificent,
race. I was on the (Thurgood) Marshall team. Even our field trips felt invested with meaning—the
favored destination was Baltimore’s National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, where our pantheon
was rendered lifelike by the disciples of Marie Tussaud.
Given this near-totemic reverence
for black history, my trip to Gettysburg—the site of the ultimate battle in a failed war to protect
and extend slavery—should cut like a lighthouse beam across the sea of memory.
But when I look back on those years when black history was seen as tangible, as
an antidote for the ills of the street, and when I think on my first visit to America’s original hallowed ground, all is fog.
I remember riding in a beautiful
coach bus, as opposed to the hated yellow cheese. I remember stopping at
Hardee’s for lunch, and savoring the respite from my vegetarian father’s lima
beans and tofu. I remember cannons, and a display of guns. But as for any
connections to the very history I was regularly baptized in, there is nothing.
In fact, when I recall all the attempts to inculcate my classmates with some
sense of legacy and history, the gaping hole of Gettysburg opens into the chasm of the Civil War.
We knew, of course, about Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But our general sense of the war was that a
horrible tragedy somehow had the magical effect of getting us free. Its legacy
belonged not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a
time when we were property.
Our alienation was neither achieved
in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American
design. The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the
country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with
each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true:
that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on
property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many
Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been
evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and
individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of
American history, the fact of black people is a problem.
In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: it had seen 2
percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would
countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people. The
mass bloodletting shocked the senses. At the war’s start, Senator James Chesnut
Jr. of South Carolina, believing that casualties would be minimal, claimed he
would drink all the blood shed in the coming disturbance. Five years later,
620,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked
for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called “one of the worst for which a people
ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse” invited the
damnation of history. Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so
from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery
in a country premised on liberty.
The fallen Confederacy’s chroniclers
grasped this historiographic challenge and, immediately after the war, began
erasing all evidence of the crime—that is to say, they began erasing black
people—from the written record. In his collection of historical essays This
Mighty Scourge, James McPherson notes that before the war, Jefferson Davis
defended secession, saying it was justified by Lincoln’s alleged radicalism. Davis
claimed that Lincoln’s plan to limit slavery would make “property in slaves so
insecure as to be comparatively worthless … thereby annihilating in effect
property worth thousands of millions of dollars.” Alexander Stephens renounced
the notion that all men are created equal, claiming that the Confederacy was
founded upon exactly the opposite idea … upon the great
truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination
to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.
He called this ideology a “great
physical, philosophical and moral truth.”
But after the war, each man changed
his interpretation. Davis referred to the “existence of African servitude” as “only
an incident,” not the cause of the war. Stephens asserted,
Slavery, so called, was but the question on which these
antagonistic principles … of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism … on
the other … were finally brought into … collision.
Davis later wrote:
Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on
each other. The tempter came, like the serpent of Eden, and decoyed them with
the magic word of “freedom” … He put arms in their hands, and trained their
humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed, and sent them
out to devastate their benefactors.
In such revisions of history lay the
roots of the noble Lost Cause—the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as
it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a
contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution,
was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost
Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and
saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could
magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the
concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the
North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by
the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of
appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the
Constitution itself.
By the time of the 50th-anniversary
commemoration of Gettysburg, this new and comfortable history was on full display.
Speakers at the ceremony pointedly eschewed any talk of the war’s cause in
hopes of pursuing what the historian David Blight calls “a mourning without
politics.” Woodrow Wilson, when he addressed the crowd, did not mention slavery
but asserted that the war’s meaning could be found in “the splendid valor, the
manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands
and smiling into each other’s eyes.” Wilson, born into the Confederacy and the first postbellum
president to hail from the South, was at that very moment purging blacks from
federal jobs and remanding them to separate washrooms. Thus Wilson executed a familiar act of theater—urging the country’s
white citizens away from their history, while continuing to act in the spirit
of its darkest chapters. Wilson’s ideas were not simply propaganda, but notions derived
from some of the country’s most celebrated historians. James McPherson notes
that titans of American history like Charles Beard, Avery Craven, and James G.
Randall minimized the role of slavery in the war; some blamed the violence on
irreconcilable economic differences between a romantic pastoral South and a
capitalistic manufacturing North, or on the hot rhetoric of radical
abolitionists.
With a firm foothold in the public
memory and in the academic history, the comfortable narrative found its most
influential expression in the popular media. Films like Birth of a Nation and
Gone With the Wind revealed an establishment more interested in the
alleged sins perpetrated upon Confederates than in the all-too-real sins
perpetrated upon the enslaved people in their midst. That predilection
continues. In 2010’s The Conspirator, the director Robert Redford’s Mary
Surratt is the preferred victim of political persecution—never mind those whose
very lives were persecution. The new AMC show Hell on Wheels deploys the
trope of the blameless Confederate wife ravished and killed by Union marauders,
as though Fort Pillow never happened.
The comfortable narrative haunts
even the best mainstream presentations of the Civil War. Ken Burns’s eponymous
and epic documentary on the war falsely claims that the slaveholder Robert E.
Lee was personally against slavery. True, Lee once asserted in a letter that
slavery was a “moral & political evil.” But in that same letter, he argued
that there was no sense protesting the peculiar institution and that its demise
should be left to “a wise Merciful Providence.” In the meantime, Lee was happy
to continue, in Lincoln’s words, wringing his “bread from the sweat of other men’s
faces.”
Burns also takes as his narrator
Shelby Foote, who once called Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a
slave-trader and Klansman, “one of the most attractive men who ever walked
through the pages of history,” and who presents the Civil War as a kind of big,
tragic misunderstanding. “It was because we failed to do the thing we really
have a genius for, which is compromise,” said Foote, neglecting to mention the
Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the
fact that any further such compromise would have meant the continued
enslavement of black people.
For that particular community, for
my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for
white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks
feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but
never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that
we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary
War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional
invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline.
In my study of African American
history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center
stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida
B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years
ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and found not a
shadow, but the Big Bang that brought the ideas of the modern West to fruition.
Our lofty notions of democracy, egalitarianism, and individual freedom were
articulated by the Founders, but they were consecrated by the thousands of
slaves fleeing to Union lines, some of them later returning to the land of
their birth as nurses and soldiers. The first generation of the South’s
postbellum black political leadership was largely supplied by this class.
Transfixed by the war’s central role
in making democracy real, I have now morphed into a Civil War buff, that
peculiar specimen who pores over the books chronicling the battles, then walks
the parks where the battles were fought by soldiers, then haunts the small
towns from which the soldiers hailed, many never to return.
This journey—to Paris, Tennessee; to
Petersburg, Virginia; to Fort Donelson; to the Wilderness—has been one of the
most meaningful of my life, though at every stop I have felt myself ill-dressed
in another man’s clothes. What echoes from nearly all the sites chronicling the
war is a deep sense of tragedy. At Petersburg, the film in the visitor center mourns the city’s fall and
the impending doom of Richmond. At the Wilderness, the park ranger instructs you on the
details of the men’s grisly deaths. The celebrated Civil War historian Bruce
Catton best sums up this sense when he refers to the war as “a consuming
tragedy so costly that generations would pass before people could begin to say
whether what it had bought was worth the price.”
All of those “people” are white.
For African Americans, war commenced
not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America’s
first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered
blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also
a declaration of war.
Over the next two centuries, the
vast majority of the country’s blacks were robbed of their labor and subjected
to constant and capricious violence. They were raped and whipped at the
pleasure of their owners. Their families lived under the threat of existential
violence—in just the four decades before the Civil War, more than 2 million
African American slaves were bought and sold. Slavery did not mean merely
coerced labor, sexual assault, and torture, but the constant threat of having a
portion, or the whole, of your family consigned to oblivion. In all regards,
slavery was war on the black family.
African Americans understood they
were at war, and reacted accordingly: running away, rebelling violently,
fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and—less spectacularly,
though more significantly—refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian
God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and,
in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of
learning to read. Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war,
and subsequently turned the antebellum South into a police state. In 1860, the
majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, and a significant minority of those living in the entire
South, needed passes to travel the roads, and regularly endured the hounding of
slave patrols.
It is thus predictable that when you
delve into the thoughts of black people of that time, the Civil War appears in
a different light. In her memoir of the war, the abolitionist Mary Livermore
recalls her pre-war time with an Aunt Aggy, a house slave. Livermore saw Aggy’s mixed-race daughter brutally attacked by the
patriarch of the home. In a private moment, the woman warned Livermore that she could “hear the rumbling of the chariots” and that
a day was coming when “white folks’ blood is running on the ground like a
river.”
After the war had started, Livermore
again met Aunt Aggy, who well recalled her prophecy and saw in the Civil War,
not tragedy, but divine justice. “I always knowed it was coming,” the woman
told Livermore.
“I always heard the rumbling of the wheels. I always
expected to see white folks heaped up dead. And the Lord, He’s kept His promise
and avenged His people, just as I knowed He would.”
For blacks, it was not merely the
idea of the war that had meaning, but the tangible violence, the actions of
black people themselves as the killers and the killed, that mattered. Corporal
Thomas Long, of the 33rd United States Colored Troops, told his fellow black
soldiers, “If we hadn’t become soldiers, all might have gone back as
it was before … But now things can never go back, because we have shown our
energy and our courage and our natural manhood.”
Reflecting on the days leading to
the Civil War, Frederick Douglass wrote:
I confess to a feeling allied to satisfaction at the
prospect of a conflict between the North and the South. Standing outside the
pale of American humanity, denied citizenship, unable to call the land of my
birth my country, and adjudged by the supreme court of the United States to
have no rights which white men were bound to respect, and longing for the end
of the bondage of my people, I was ready for any political upheaval which
should bring about a change in the existing condition of things.
He went on to assert that the Civil
War was an achievement that outstripped the American Revolution:
It was a great thing to achieve American independence when
we numbered three millions. But it was a greater thing to save this country
from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions.
The 20th century, with its struggles
for equal rights, with the triumph of democracy as the ideal in Western
thought, proved Douglass right. The Civil War marks the first great defense of
democracy and the modern West. Its legacy lies in everything from women’s
suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East. It
was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were
first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.
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.
For
the portion of the country that still honors, or traces its ancestry to,
the men who fired on Fort Sumter, and thus brought war, the truthful story of
the Civil War tells of a defeat richly deserved, garnered in a pursuit now
condemned. For the blameless North, it throws up the failed legacy of
appeasement of slaveholders, the craven willingness to bargain on the backs of
black people, and the unwillingness, in the Reconstruction years, to finish
what the war started.
For realists, the true story of the
Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with
powerful, and intractable, evil. For radicals, the wave of white terrorism that
followed the war offers lessons on the price of revolutionary change. White
Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the
civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in
this country achieved the rudiments of their freedom through the killing of
whites.
And for black people, there is
this—the burden of taking ownership of the Civil War as Our War. During my
trips to battlefields, the near-total absence of African American visitors has
been striking. Confronted with the realization that the Civil War is the
genesis of modern America, in general, and of modern black America, in particular, we cannot just implore the Park Service and
the custodians of history to do more outreach—we have to become custodians
ourselves.
The Lost Cause was spread, not
merely by academics and Hollywood executives, but by the descendants of Confederate soldiers.
Now the country’s battlefields are marked with the enduring evidence of their
tireless efforts. But we have stories too, ones that do not hinge on erasing
other people, or coloring over disrepute. For the Civil War to become Our War,
it will not be enough to, yet again, organize opposition to the latest raising
of the Confederate flag. The Civil War confers on us the most terrible burden
of all—the burden of moving from protest to production, the burden of summoning
our own departed hands, so that they, too, may leave a mark.
