Civil War and Memory

When I was an early teen, I went with my grandmother to the Charleston Museum. In the Civil War section, I asked her if anyone from her Virginia family had fought in the war. She paused and recounted a story that her own grandmother had told her: near the end of the war Confederate soldiers had come by her grandmother's family farm and conscripted on the spot a young male relative. The boy was never heard from again except for word that he had died. At that point in my life, I suppose I was looking to hear a couragous story. Instead, my grandmother (who had her own experiences of seeing friends go off to war and not return) told me a story of a little boy's life thrown away in the last, futile gasps of a dying army. In her story, the bad guys were not the reviled "Yankees" but troops in gray sweeping children into the maw of death in service of a doomed war machine.

I can't confirm that story. I do not know the relative in question, and I am certainly not a descendant. It is hard to decend from a child soldier killed in battle or - perhaps more likely in the poorly-supplied and half-starved southern armies - died of disease.

I can't confirm the story, but it did challege my boyish concept of the war. Little I have learned since then has given me cause to hold the southern cause in the esteem I once did. The rebellion of the southern states unleashed economic devistation and death upon the country.

Another moment from my early teenage years stands out: One Saturday morning while driving out of the South Windermere shopping center, I asked my father if he wished the south had won the war. Now my father looked with pride on his great-grandfather, Sgt. Lunsford F. Harley of the 1st SC Inf., but his answer to me was quick and decisive. We should be profoundly grateful the south lost. He invited me to imagine just how the agriarian and economically backward southern states would have done as an independant nation in the 20th century.

This is before you get to the morally indefensible, utterly reprehensible issue of slavery.

While the soldiers of the Confederacy may have been as individuals valiant and honorable, the cause that they served was not worthy of that valor or honor. The Confederate cause cannot be separated from the maintenance, indeed furtherance, of the institution of slavery. Claimed causes such as "States Rights" only provide cover for the economic and political concerns related to maintaining slavery in an increasingly skeptical world. Confederate victory would not have created a utopia of traditional family values, small government, good manners, and liberty, but it would have created a society far less free and far less prosperous than the society and nation (with all its problems) that we currently enjoy. While we might remember our ancestors in gray with some affection, we should be profoundly grateful for the courage and the sacrifice that led the boys in blue to victory. Theirs' was the cause of liberty.

The Confederacy did its level best to destroy the United States as it existed at the time and as it exists now. To cite a single example, I cannot imagine a history without a UNITED States of America, the strength of its people and industry, to defeat the evil which threw itself upon the world in the Second World War.

Taken in abstraction, it would be ridiculous were it not so tragic how much marble and bronze we southerners have put up remembering what is the worst part of our history. We can add to that tradgedy the additional tradgedy of the use of those very monuments by those who put them up a generation after the war to underline the re-emergence of white economic and political power over African Americans.

Lee and Jackson were undoubtedly skillful. Ordininary Confederates were valiant, but that skill and valor only served to make the war longer and more terrible.

I do not think that we should forget or erase our history. And I would suggest that monuments to the Conferderacy do belong and should be preserved in cemetaries, on battlefields, and in museums where they can tell something of the tradgedy and horror of war. But glory and honor are not theirs to tell, and I think that we should back away from pretending that they are.

There are so many other moments of our shared history which could decorate our thoroughfares and courhouse lawns. We can and should remembers the founders of our nation and the soldiers of the Revolution. We should remember the veterans of the World Wars. We should remember the heros of the Civil Rights movement. We have all too much opportunity to remember the dead of our present wars. Provocatively, we should remember those Southerners who remained loyal to the Union, and those freedmen who joined the Union Army at risk of death or re-enslavement if captured. We should remember many others. The crowd of monuments to the Confederacy that dot the South seem to be a misuse of good bronze.

My fear for us is that, frustrated with the divisions of the present day, we begin to hear the siren call of glory found in those old bronzes remembering fondly civil war and forget just how terrible such war is. The repugnint, evil voices shouting in Charlottesville seem to have forgotten (or never learned) those lessons. We should not join them.

If you want to remember a Confederate soldier today, remember a Virginia farm boy, taken from his family, and never seen again. That is civil war.