The 150th anniversary of the Civil War is approaching and it shows just how much things have changed and, in many ways, how they remain the same.
Virginia was the epicenter of so much of the grief the war caused plus the triumph of African-American slaves who, in a new historical interpretation of the war, bravely faced death from Southerners for pushing for freedom but also somehow forced their emancipation on a reluctant North.
What’s important to note is that many of the political and constitutional issues that the war brought forward are still being battled over today, namely the 14 Amendment which gave African-American slaves citizenship if they were born on U.S. Today, some conservatives want to repeal the 14th Amendment because they see it being used by mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants who cook up a legal stew on citizenship if they have babies in the U.S.
I had the pleasure of putting these questions to Ed Ayers, the preident of the University of Richmond who is a well-regarded historian and scholar on the Civil War and Amerian history. His interview with me has run in two publications, Diverse Issues in Higher Education and in Richmond’s Style Weekly.
Meeting with me in his study last December, Ayers gave me an hour’s worth of commentary that I found remarkable for its precision and breadth. His key point is that unlike earlier rembrances where Blacks didn’t get to play much of a role, the Sesquicentennial will celebrate Emanicaption as much as the war itself. He blieves that Blacks cleverly forced their emancipation on the North, which he says later celebrated themselves as great human rights heroes.
He has a point. When the Centennial opened in 1961, I was a boy of about eight living in the D.C. area. The war to me meant lots of cool and gory trading cards showing Confederate and Yankee troops getting blown in half by cannon fire. Indeed, much of the celebration dealt with the usual White Southerner stuff about tactical manuevers by genius Southern generals and the romantic sacrifice for a lost Southern cause. This view was reinforced later in my life when I lived in North Carolina and in Virginia.
As Ayers pointed out, this manufactured view changed since it hit at a key moment in the Civil Rights movement with Selma, and the March on Washington, the dead college boys in Mississippi, and later race riots in Northern and MidWestern cities. Virginia started the Centennial with Massive Resistance to integration and by the time it ended in 1965, it was still a felony for a White and Black person to marry.
Here are a few highlights from Dr. Ayer’s interview:
Regarding the a controversy in Virginia about textbooks erroenously saying that 200,000 Blacks fought for the South.
“This has been a major point that those who would like to resist this revolution in understanding: If black men had fought for the Confederacy, then the war could not have been about slavery. It’s the reason people want to show that. But in fact we know that 200,000 black men fought for the Union. While there may have been some who picked up a gun in defense of the Confederacy or alongside their owner, there’s been nothing like this.
“Why the North fought against slavery was because black people forced it to be a war against slavery. They started flooding to these Union camps. They started demanding to be an ally in their own freedom. And it’s that northern men started running in shortages for enlistments. So the North needed black men to fight. The number of black troops who fought is larger than all the troops that fought at Gettysburg. This is a significant number of people who were fighting.
You also see that you didn’t have to be a black soldier to damage the Confederacy and thereby help the Union. Everywhere they could, women escaped to the Union from slavery as fast as they could. When their men were gone, many just refused to work. Without force, they said, now our time is our own. We’ll feed our children. We’ll take care of ourselves. We’ll get a crop in the ground.”
You have people fighting Hispanic immigration and as part of that they want to repeal the 14th Amendment. You have the anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Prince William Count. What’s the context here?
“It shows that issues touched by the Civil War haven’t left us. That’s why it’s important to understand where the 14th amendment came form in the first place. Every time we think this story is behind us, we find that it is not. Slavery is the great sin of this country’s history, followed by nearly 100 years of segregation. We can’t think we can just put it behind us. The Civil War is woven into all the hard questions about American society. It involves the powers of the state versus the federal government just this week about health care. There are two things here. One strand is how federalism works. The other is about the place of race and injustice in our society. These two things are always weaving together. The sesquicentennial gives us a way to see that this is all part of the same story.”
Richmond may be a city of monuments to Confederate generals. But if you go to other Southern cities such as Charleston, S.C, you see them marketing the “Confederacy” to tourists with the flags and uniforms. You don’t see that here. Somehow it’s OK there but not here. Why?
“Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. We’ve had one struggle after the other about this and it’s not productive. You’ve had the struggle over the floodwall; the Lincoln statue. One of the best days I have had in Richmond was at the unveiling of the Civil Rights Memorial at the capitol. African-Americans in Farmville began a moral revolution in this country.
“Richmond had half the battles of the Civil War taking place 30 miles from here. Charleston had one day in the Civil War when it fires on Fort Sumter. Richmond, on the other hand, was the center of suffering for so long.”
For the complete interview, read Style.
Peter Galuszka
Related
