Is it not insanity or perhaps irony that in one of the great times of division in our country, we are destroying the monuments to the greatest time of division in our country? We are scrubbing from the surface the cosmetic reminders of that time and blindly labeling one side of that great war as unequivocally evil. Wouldn’t it make more sense instead to delve deeper into that time? Shouldn’t we explore how those divisions exploded into violence which nearly destroyed this country before it was fully settled? Perhaps we should even try to fast forward and explore how the country was put back together and see if there might be lessons there that allow us to avoid another costly and bloody split or help us put this country back together without the cost of a war?
The issues as I see them are similar if not the same. It is the division of fruits of labor and who should reap those fruits. It is the frustrations and despair of a rural agrarian society dealing with the alien to them dictates of a more refined and technological urban society. It is the changing changing technological landscape reshaping the lives of proud and good men and women who choose to live by the sweat of their brow and their hands in the dirt. It is men and women with mental ability and talents bringing into being almost magical technology to better the lives of all, but also displacing those same industrious men and women who have provided the succor that allowed these wonders to come to pass.
Will we really regress to disposition of these fruits of both mental and physical exertions of the boundless talents of our people being decided by the outcome of physical violence? Will we really regress to labeling people as less than with the only difference being the ideas they espouse instead of the color of their skin? Will we really resort to killing one another until one side emerges as the sole undisputed victor or both sides are unalterably destroyed?
A bit over a quarter of a century ago, when I was but a young man from a small town seeking out what life had in store for me, the stories of the Civil War enraptured me. I spent time in libraries and archives the universities I attended and those pointed out to me by others. In dark rooms with the smell of mold and hot incandescent bulbs against microfilm, I immersed myself in stories of men and women who lived over a century before me. Men and women who lived through our Civil War or died in it.
While we, more than a century later, still debate whether it was over states rights or slavery or something else entirely, their letters and recollections make scant mention of either. In times when they were facing death at the hands of their countrymen, soldiers on both sides, wrote not of the destiny of states to determine their own fate. Nor did they write of the evils and horrors of binding one man in slavery to another.
No, They wrote of mundane things like the weather and how it might affect the crops. They wrote of aspirations to own land or get “letters”, a term I learned referred to getting a college degree. They wrote of hopes for their children. They wrote of love to their families and wives and sweethearts. They wrote of hope and heartache. They wrote of new friends they would never had known save the coming of the war. They wrote of future homecomings and celebrations of loved ones milestones.
There was also the official tales of the Confederacy’s governments and their accomplishments. Rivers made navigable. Bridges built to join together communities previously kept apart by geography. Long negotiated treaties made with Native American tribes on behalf of the Confederacy which were honored by the United States government after the war. Treaties that allowed some 17 tribes to survive to live among us instead of being wiped out by white settlers and U.S. soldiers. Levy’s and dams made possibly by soldier laborers that added hundreds of acres of rich farmland to needy communities, some of them freedmen communities.
And the histories of officers of the confederacy and officers of the union and their deeds after the war were as varied as their stories that brought them to war. One Confederate officer came to help found the Democratic party in Arkansas and worked to reform the prison system to be more fair and humane to the freedmen. One Union officer went on to be perhaps the biggest instigator of war crimes against the Native American tribes. And we all should know the tale of Sherman, who burned everything in his path, whether it belonged to white men and women or freedmen and women.
The inescapable conclusions I reached from my random samplings of these tales both true and apocryphal were this: Both evil and good men will likely exist on both sides of any war. War can make good men do bad things and bad men do good things. The differences between good and bad men are far smaller than any of us would care to admit. And the final conclusion was that unless he is dead, a man can come back from even the most evil deeds to do good for his country, family and community.
Do we really want to destroy this knowledge and cease to learn about it? It was hard won and hard fought knowledge about ourselves and who we are. We paid for it with our blood and treasure. If anything I would think this knowledge would be all the more sacred since we paid more for it than we did for the knowledge gleaned from any other war. And there is already some of it being lost every day just to vicissitudes of time.
Perhaps if we are going to purge Confederate statues, we should take the time to learn about the soldiers they represent. If we are going to judge them, should we not get to know them? Or is just the color of the uniform they wore enough to say they are not worth knowing? Is the color of the uniform they wore enough fact to condemn them as less than human? Is that how progress, tolerance and social justice work?
