While returning from a trip to see family, my wife commented that we were driving through an almost never-ending stream of Civil War battlefields that reinforce the military losses of the Civil War without reinforcing the moral meaning of what happened.
New York and Virginia bore a large part of America’s war history. The Revolution’s crucial battles were fought in New York before England reconcentrated on the South, at which point Virginia bore the brunt of the fighting.
The Civil War was even more concentrated on Virginia battlefields. After Gettysburg, Lincoln had enough of his Northern generals, some skilled but unwilling to fight, and called for Grant and Sherman who had been fighting and winning in the west, to take over the battle in the East. Sherman had a brief nervous breakdown, realizing he was going to be responsible for innumerable deaths, but though Southerners don’t give him credit for it, Sherman used tactics that forced his opponents back with minimal loss of life, though at the cost of food supplies for the Confederate army. By the time Sherman’s army had marched to the sea, what he was really threatening was to march north, join Grant’s army and crush Lee. Lee of course understood and surrendered first.
Until then, Lee kept a lot of pressure on Grant, but Grant didn’t back off, and kept moving his army to flank Lee, so the battle continued in a never-ending series of battles and battlegrounds with tremendous losses and sites for future monuments all over Virginia.
Apologists for those battles see the cleverness of Confederate generals and the overwhelming power of northern armies. But they miss the larger moral meaning of the Civil War. Denying the significance of slavery hides the huge moral failure at its heart. Civil War history was blanketed under a century of apologetics until better historians poked through the nonsense.
- The War would not have happened but for slavery.
- Slavery wasn’t good for the slaves – lack of freedom is a disaster, not an advantage. I don’t suggest you try it.
- What America did after the Civil War wasn’t about vengeance, as some have been taught; it was about freedom. It’s time we take pride in that accomplishment.
Democracy is imperfect, but it allows us to correct mistakes, great moral wrongs and mistreatment of others. The Civil War was a very expensive example of righting a great wrong.
Ironically, at the time the Constitution was written, prominent Virginians – Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Mason and others – knew slavery was morally wrong but expected it to go away, perhaps gradually as Pennsylvania, on Virginia’s northern border, did it. But hotheads pushed for war to protect slavery.
Some southern governors are trying to keep the Civil War alive in America by trying to erase the injustice of slavery, erase the accomplishments of the descendants of slaves, and allow schoolchildren to grow up thinking that southern mistreatment of African-Americans was perfectly OK, somehow manly.
America has a hothead problem and we have to learn to stand up to our hotheads and continue making progress for decency, and the great American ideals embodied in the 14th Amendment – life, liberty and equality for everyone.
Trump and his MAGA friends better accept those ideals before they face the modern equivalents of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and the bloodbath they are arguing for, with their guns, gun rights claims, threats and intimidation of witnesses and public officials, and their private unregulated militias. The sooner we quash those armed hotheads the better.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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