Anniversary: The End of the Civil War, the Beginning of Jim Crow

GELFAND’S WORLD-On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee understood that he was defeated, and surrendered his army to General Ulysses S. Grant at the village of Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. It's the 150th anniversary of that event as of this writing. Lee's surrender was the other momentous moment in American history, along with the surrender of the British at Yorktown. By Lee's surrender, slavery in North America was defeated. But could the disaster of the next hundred years have been averted?  

The Jim Crow system and the KKK and voter suppression should have been smashed the moment they cropped up, but it was not to be. Historians, amateur and professional, have debated the effect of Lincoln's assassination, which was only a few days after Lee's surrender. 

In any case, we have to admit that the century between 1865 and 1965 was not as it should have been for the freed slaves or, in later years, for African Americans who lived under racism and discrimination. The job was left unfinished. This contrasts with the results of WWII, in which Germany and Japan, two utterly defeated nations, were turned into modern democracies. 

Ignoring alternative universe scenarios and otherworldly speculation, we have to recognize that those few hours and days in April, 1865 have reverberated down through the last century and a half, affecting all of American history that was to come. The war left a split country that even today is recognizable as the blue states and the red states, with the red states following the historical line of the old Confederacy pretty closely. 

The recognizably silly calls for Texas secession are symbolic of that split, even if they are just bones tossed to the lame-brains of this modern world. 

In following the discussions of this sesquicentennial (a long word referring to the 150th anniversary) remembrance, I've noticed a few arguments that didn't seem to show up in my high school history books or in what passed for civilized discussion in previous years. 

The first item involves the description of the Confederates as traitors. The definition of treason in the U.S. Constitution is simple and straightforward, referring to the giving of aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war or in levying war against the United States. When rebels attacked the U.S. base known as Fort Sumter, was that an act of treason, or an act of rebellion, or merely an exaggerated form of criminal mischief? 

The answer to this question seems to be quite impossible to answer. One philosophy seems to have been that the union never ceased to exist. At least this was a good enough rationalization for trying to force the rebellious states to come back home to the United States of America. If the union were merely a voluntary association of former British colonies, there would have been less moral authority in trying to crush the rebellion. 

The corollary to this line of thought is that once you have joined the union as a member state, you cannot reverse that action simply through your own state authority. 

Presumably, Confederate leaders could have been tried and executed under the levying war phrase in the Constitutional definition of treason, but it's clear that neither Lincoln nor Grant supported that approach to the coming victory. 

What's interesting is that modern commenters repeatedly use the terms treason and traitors to refer to the Confederates. I need only refer to the New York Times series called Disunion, which appears as part of its Opinionator online blog. For those of you who wish to get a more detailed account of the war's details, I recommend taking a look at any part of this series, which has been going on since the sesquicentennial of Lincoln's election as President of the United States. 

And then there was the overriding and overwhelming issue of slavery. The union was born in schism over slavery, and no amount of temporizing could put the reckoning off forever. 

Perhaps we should recognize the service that the secessionists provided, because time and careful consideration make clear this unhappy thought: Only war was capable of resolving the difference of opinion that separated slave states from free states. Perhaps the war could have been less costly had it been carried out differently, or perhaps the slave-holding states could have been led by people with a more forward looking world view. But the reality was different. 

When I was in high school, we were taught that there was disagreement over the cause or causes of the Civil War. We understood the idea of fighting over the future of slavery, but there was a counterargument that the war was about State's Rights. This is, in effect, an argument over the balance of power between the national government and the individual states.

Modern scholarship has made more clear what was known even at the time, that the state's right that the Confederacy was fighting over was the right to maintain the economy of slavery. Politicians skirmished over the question of whether new states coming into the union from the western territories would be admitted as free or slave states, or whether they would have the right to determine the answer on their own. 

Clearly, the Confederate secession was based on the desire to maintain slavery as a legal and economic system. That's what the war was fought over, because that was the difference of opinion that sparked the secession. This is important, because modern day southerners don't officially support the idea of slavery, but they continue to defend the right of the southern states to go their own way. This is taken so far as to refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. An old friend once explained to me that this was the term he was taught in public school in the southern state where he grew up. 

There are a couple of corollaries to these conclusions that we ought to consider carefully. 

The first is that teaching children a big lie in the public schools is damaging. The children of the modern south should be taught the truth, that the war was fought over slavery, and they should be invited to consider what their own views should be about the existence of the slave economy. 

The other corollary is for the residents of the blue states. We have been facing a radicalized red state approach to American governance which picks up on several of the rationalizations that were used by the original secessionists. These include the concept of State's Rights as the argument for ignoring federal law. Most importantly, the red states are now personified by Republican Party leaders who are caught up in all manner of dangerous and illogical positioning, from the refusal to accept the separation of church and state, to the opposition to important scientific findings such as global warming.

It's become a country divided among the old Confederacy and the rest of us. The problem is that the rest of us haven't quite gotten the word that this is an intersectional dispute that imperils our own way of life. For this reason, the northern tier should recognize that a southern political party is not for us, and that we should unite to oppose that tendency.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])  

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CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 30

Pub: Apr 10, 2015