Is it a states’ rights issue?

The letter published on June 9 entitled “War reenactments are valuable” was puzzling to me.

I do not understand what point is being made.

The writer, John Campbell, states, “It’s important to remember that both sides were, and are still Americans... But they had different beliefs.”

What different beliefs does Mr. Campbell have in mind?

I may be reading between lines incorrectly, but I am wondering if the Southern “states’ rights” position is the argument to which he refers.

If so, then I say, yes, believers in states’ rights were and are Americans.

State supremacy versus federal supremacy in regard to many issues has been a consistent source of tension in American politics and history.

Is it this which, Mr. Campbell claims, excites “groups and organizations that will try and erase that history”?

The problem with our telling and retelling of Civil War history perhaps lies in the close association of the states’ rights argument, itself constitutionally legitimate, with a morally repugnant defense of the institution of human enslavement.

That, it seems to me, is the nub of the issue when attempting to defend the “lost cause.”

We cannot call ourselves a nation committed to the idea and the ideal that all men are created equal, while we in some roundabout way, after more than 150 years, continue to attempt to justify “states’ rights,” when applied to a moral abomination, or downplay the Confederacy’s intent to preserve that inhumane institution.

Moreover, the events that followed the war demonstrated that the states’ rights vantage point survived, much to the disadvantage of former slaves and their descendants.

We continue to pay the price of that post-war history.

However, to be clear, I am not arguing that “states’ rights” is in itself a bad point of view.

The tensions over our history, and over reenactments of our history, is the tension over legalisms versus morality, over right uses of our constitutional mechanisms to obtain justice and live up to our stated ideals, as opposed to wrong uses that dismiss the value or humanity of our fellow men.

It is fine to reenact the glory, the valor, the selfsacrifice of a people and a cause.

But in that reenactment, there must be an acknowledgment that in our civil war, while neither side was wholly right nor wholly wrong, the fundamental problem centered on an immorality that could not be, and cannot be, ignored.