The fabric of America
Confederate monuments are painful reminders of America’s slave past. Today’s uproar over them is part of our tradition of debate, says ANDREW E. MASICH, while our national loom may require some retooling
Slavery was the root cause of the American Civil War. In fact, the inhumanity of slavery has been the cause of civil strife around the world for millennia. It takes the passage of time through generations to undo its pernicious effects. Here in the United States, we still live with its legacy. Issues of power and dominance, racial inequality and intolerance haunt us still and threaten to pull apart the fabric of our nation — a union that many had supposed permanently knitted together.
It should surprise no one that recent protests and counter-protests focused on Confederate monuments have revealed the many knots and flaws in the weave of our national character and Constitution-woven in as compromises by the founding generation. Succeeding generations attempted to amend or rationalize the inherent contradiction of slavery embedded in the Constitution. Their patchwork fixes resulted in something neither true to the nation’s principles nor sustainable over the long run.
Rebellion and civil war inevitably came. “All knew,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1865, that slavery “was somehow the cause of the war.” Historians agree that slavery was at the heart of this conflict, but if one could go back in time and randomly interview Northerners and Southerners, white and black, about why they were fighting you would receive answers ranging from “freedom” to “Union” to “States Rights” to “equal rights” to “cultural survival.” It is likely that you would receive as many different answers as you would if interviewing an equal number of people about the Confederate monuments controversy and civil unrest today.
It is altogether fitting that we should engage in debate over the rights and protections promised by our republic of united states nearly 250 years ago. In 1776 the world began to awaken to the dream of liberty and democracy. It is somewhat surprising that the current retrospection and controversy over monuments honoring rebels did not occur during the recent 150th anniversary (2011-15) of the Civil War, while our first AfricanAmerican president occupied the White House. Deemed too politically charged, no national sesquicentennial commission was empaneled and serious discussion of the war’s causes never took place. Perhaps the recent events are a delayed reaction or maybe a new generation is finally awakening to its history.
An understanding of our history is key to making sense of our past and making plans for the future. While the first American rebellion (1776) began with the pulling down of King George’s statue, the second rebellion (1861) saw the striking of the Stars and Stripes of the United States. The rebels, believing themselves to be continuing the traditions of their fathers, reconstructed the flag by resewing the stripes of red, white, and blue as the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.
In both rebellions, citizens took to the streets and the rule of law was swept aside in favor of revolution. This is how it has worked for thousands of years when people feel disenfranchised or oppressed. Even Thomas Jefferson believed, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Let’s hope our society has sufficiently
matured so that we can avoid the violence that is often the companion of change.
The Civil War ended slavery and resulted in constitutional changes that supposedly guaranteed rights to all men (it would take another, less violent, revolution before women would be included) but did not end injustice to those formerly enslaved African-Americans and their descendants. The people of the South who supported the Confederacy lost the war that killed or maimed more than a million and resulted in untold suffering among the civilian population, black and white, North and South.
A pall of despair settled over the South — where nearly every major city had been a battlefield. Hoping to reunite the country, Lincoln said, “let ’em up easy.” He understood the need for a proud people to save face. Robert E. Lee shared Lincoln’s desire for peaceful reconciliation. Lee hoped to rejoin the union of re-united states and advised his countrymen against raising monuments or other displays of defiance. The beaten South remained relatively peaceful, but when the occupying armies withdrew, resistance grew anew. Perhaps let up too easy, Southern states passed “Jim Crow” (a racist stereotype from the prewar years) laws ensuring segregation and inequality under the guise of “separate but equal” policies.
Some 50 years after the war, in both the North and South, there was a resurgence in interest in memorializing the Civil War generation. No doubt many statues and monuments were politically motivated or supported by organizations with political agendas. One hundred years after the war, white America once again turned its attention to the conflict, though with a decidedly conciliatory point of view. Books, films, re-enactments and still more monuments proliferated. In these memorials, the role of slavery was often left out of the Southern narrative of the “Lost Cause.”
Southern historians lionized Lee as a paragon of virtue and symbol of the nobility of the South’s struggle for independence. The alternative facts they presented seemed to be turning the tide in the war for the memory of the Civil War. Even Northerners and members of the congressionally appointed Civil War Centennial Commission chose not to dredge up the painful memory of America’s slave past. But African-Americans could never forget. The revolutionary Civil Rights Movement would not allow the lingering institutionalized injustices of the Jim Crow era to pass unnoticed, and Congress acted to effect change during the “Second Reconstruction” of the 1960s.
In today’s America, civil dissent can be a good thing. Civil discourse characterized by empathy can be unifying and make us stronger. An understanding of history and civics is also essential. It is time for all Americans to revisit our nation’s motto, “e
pluribus unum” (out of many, one). But it is time to focus less on the pluribus and more on the unum. We are now one people. This does not mean we need forget our roots and the paths that brought us together. The United States was never really a melting pot of assimilated people. A magnificent tapestry woven of millions of unique threads might be a more apt analogy.
If we have the moral fiber, will and patience, we can together reweave the fabric of our nation. We can make it the tapestry that it has always aspired to be, composed of many stories and admired by all the world.
Our national loom may require some retooling. The warp and weft of our country has changed, and some of our dyed-in-the-wool convictions will have to change as well. Confederate monuments are painful reminders of America’s slave past. How do we forgive the unforgivable? At the same time, these memorials reflect Southern pride. Is there a way to reconcile the two? The Confederates lost the war. Perhaps their monuments should fall to the victors’ hammers and ropes as has been the tradition for millennia.
What would Lincoln say of Confederate statues? Perhaps he would advise, “let ’em down easy.” Following thoughtful deliberation, some monuments in public places should be reinterpreted, relocated, or permanently removed. There is right and wrong — and then there is getting along. In any event, the will of the people must prevail. That is how democracy works. As the model for democratic republics, we the people of the United States owe it to our forebears, our heirs and the world to get it right.