I have read a variety of accounts, written from all different perspectives, of and about the Civil War. However, the ones to really catch my ire are the ones that seek to glorify the Confederacy and "return Southern honor", as if there could be any honor in attempting to overthrow the legitimately elected government, merely because of what the chief executive "might do". There are a whole horde of reasons why certain people chose to support the Confederacy over the Union: slavery, economics, hatred of Lincoln, fear of abolition, and favoring a government with strong state governments and a week federal one. Choosing one as the "soul" reason for the war is ludicrous, they all played their part. However, the South, in attempting to rewrite their own history, has chosen to downplay or even ignore the part that slavery played in sparking the war and keeping it going. They favor blaming the politicians for causing it. as Rodger Pryor does:
"The bloody business of secession, with all its disastrous consequences, was wholly the act of the professed men of peace --- the politicians."
Pryor also divorces the Confederacy from supporting slavery as well:
"True, the material interests of the South were essentially implicated in the maintenance of the system; but philosophically, it [slavery] was the occasion not the cause of secession. For the cause of secession you must look beyond the incident of the anti-slavery agitation to that irrepressible conflict between the principles of State sovereignty and Federal supremacy,"
Confederate General Jubal Early, has nothing but criticism for all those attempting to write histories of the Civil War, but most of his scorn is for the Northern writers:
"In the former character [as criminals --- rebels and traitors seeking to throw off the authority of a legitimate government to which we were bound by the lies of allegiance] our enemies are seeking to present us, not only by their historical records, but by their literature and by the whole scope and tendency of their legislation and governmental policy."
Early is incapable of even considering that the victorious side might write a "fair and balanced" account of the South's actions during the Civil War. However, he is not really interested in an accurate accounting, he only cares in exonerating Confederate soldiers of any wrong doings and in insuring that any history written of the war portrays Southerners as a "honorable and valiant people".
I am with General Sherman, in that there was a "right" and a "wrong" in the Civil War and the Confederacy was clearly on the "wrong" side.
"There are such things as abstract right and abstract wrong, and when history is written human actions must take their place in one or the other category. We claim that, in the great civil war, we of the National Union Army were right, and our adversaries wrong; and no special plending, no excuses, no personal motives, however pure and specious, can change this verdict of the war."
However, though Sherman wants history to be written to CLEARLY show that the Union victors were on the "right" side during the war, he does counsel that the negative feelings experienced by the country from 1860-65 should not be allowed to linger in the present. He believes that the lessons of the Civil War need to be remembered, not glossed-over or altered so as the make American history more palatable.
Finally, I am in Sherman's corner that we should not be censoring or editing history in order to make ourselves feel better about the past or to present a better face to the world. The events that happened, good and bad, happened and denying their occurrence or altering them serves only to distort our past and is truly beneath us as American citizens. However, I also agree with Walt Whitman who speaks of the "untold and unwritten history of the war".
No comments:
Post a Comment