David Blight: Why the 150th anniversary of the Civil War looks more promising than the 100th
[David W. Blight is a professor of American history at Yale University. Among his books is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), winner of the Bancroft Prize for excellence in American history.]
In 1961-65, the centennial commemoration of the Civil War was a political and historical debacle. Fraught, to say the least, by cold-war nationalism, racism among its leadership as well as the general populace, an enduring hold of the Lost Cause on popular imagination, and a country violently divided by the civil-rights movement, the official Civil War centennial refused to face the challenge of causes and consequences. Instead, a reconciliationist, Blue-Gray celebration of soldiers' valor and re-emergent national greatness forged out of conflict dominated the scene. At 100 years, North and South had managed a long, complex reconciliation rooted in a master narrative of mutual heroism in a war in which everyone had fought for their sense of the "right." But the national reunion of the sections had been purchased by the Jim Crow system and a racially segregated, tragically stunted national memory.
Now fast forward to the kickoff of a commemoration of the sesquicentennial. Jumbotrons in basketball arenas and panels of academic historians are not normally associated with each other. But an event held at the University of Richmond recently, "America on the Eve of the Civil War," was anything but normal. Planned and moderated by Edward L. Ayers, president of the university and a distinguished historian of the South and the Civil War, the all-day symposium, with 16 of us, historians, on panels of four each, attracted an extraordinary audience of some 2,000 people from Virginia and 26 other states. It was the first of six annual events planned by the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission. No state suffered more loss and devastation than Virginia during the Civil War, and nowhere have people remembered that conflict with as much reverence and controversy. The Virginia commission opted to begin the sesquicentennial early to stress the theme of the war's causation.
What would bring so many people on a weekday to listen to historians reflect on why the United States collapsed into disunion in the late 1850s? First, the symposium drew its energy and vision from Ayers himself. An advocate of what he calls "deep contingency" (keeping our understanding of history within its own changing context), Ayers instructed all panelists to focus on the year 1859 and to discuss nothing that happened after that year. We were to be in that time, of its conditions and circumstances, not yet aware of the impending secession crisis and war. By and large that approach worked, as Ayers posed questions and the historians delved into details as well as debated the political and economic situation on the ground. The novel approach prevented us from quoting or referring to other scholars, which is our habit. It also led to some awkwardness as many panelists jokingly spoke of "the great events to come which will go unmentioned."...
In his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, in the midst of the centennial, Martin Luther King Jr. took his time getting to the "dream" metaphor. The central metaphor of the beginning of that speech was the "promissory note" that had come back labeled "insufficient funds" in the "bank of American justice." One hundred years after emancipation, said King so memorably, "the Negro is not free." Last November 4, as Barack Obama strode onto the stage in Grant Park in Chicago, something in excess of 50 percent of the people all over America were cheering or weeping uncontrollably. In his speech that night, Obama declared his political lineage by invoking King as well as Lincoln. The next morning in The New York Times, the columnist Thomas Friedman declared November 4 the day the Civil War ended in America. As the sesquicentennial nears, we are likely to witness the foolishness of Friedman's exuberant claim. With jobless numbers soaring and the poverty rate among all children predicted to reach 27 percent in the next year — and among African-American children, a frightening 50 percent — we should declare nothing truly ended in our history.
Legacies can take endless forms — physical, political, literary, emotional. This time, we must commemorate our Civil War in all its meanings, but above all we must commemorate and understand emancipation as its most enduring challenge. This time, the fighting of the Civil War itself should not unite us in pathos and nostalgia alone; but maybe, just maybe, we will give ourselves the chance to find unity in a shared history of conflict, in a genuine sense of tragedy, and in a conflicted memory stared squarely in the face.
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
In 1961-65, the centennial commemoration of the Civil War was a political and historical debacle. Fraught, to say the least, by cold-war nationalism, racism among its leadership as well as the general populace, an enduring hold of the Lost Cause on popular imagination, and a country violently divided by the civil-rights movement, the official Civil War centennial refused to face the challenge of causes and consequences. Instead, a reconciliationist, Blue-Gray celebration of soldiers' valor and re-emergent national greatness forged out of conflict dominated the scene. At 100 years, North and South had managed a long, complex reconciliation rooted in a master narrative of mutual heroism in a war in which everyone had fought for their sense of the "right." But the national reunion of the sections had been purchased by the Jim Crow system and a racially segregated, tragically stunted national memory.
Now fast forward to the kickoff of a commemoration of the sesquicentennial. Jumbotrons in basketball arenas and panels of academic historians are not normally associated with each other. But an event held at the University of Richmond recently, "America on the Eve of the Civil War," was anything but normal. Planned and moderated by Edward L. Ayers, president of the university and a distinguished historian of the South and the Civil War, the all-day symposium, with 16 of us, historians, on panels of four each, attracted an extraordinary audience of some 2,000 people from Virginia and 26 other states. It was the first of six annual events planned by the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission. No state suffered more loss and devastation than Virginia during the Civil War, and nowhere have people remembered that conflict with as much reverence and controversy. The Virginia commission opted to begin the sesquicentennial early to stress the theme of the war's causation.
What would bring so many people on a weekday to listen to historians reflect on why the United States collapsed into disunion in the late 1850s? First, the symposium drew its energy and vision from Ayers himself. An advocate of what he calls "deep contingency" (keeping our understanding of history within its own changing context), Ayers instructed all panelists to focus on the year 1859 and to discuss nothing that happened after that year. We were to be in that time, of its conditions and circumstances, not yet aware of the impending secession crisis and war. By and large that approach worked, as Ayers posed questions and the historians delved into details as well as debated the political and economic situation on the ground. The novel approach prevented us from quoting or referring to other scholars, which is our habit. It also led to some awkwardness as many panelists jokingly spoke of "the great events to come which will go unmentioned."...
In his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, in the midst of the centennial, Martin Luther King Jr. took his time getting to the "dream" metaphor. The central metaphor of the beginning of that speech was the "promissory note" that had come back labeled "insufficient funds" in the "bank of American justice." One hundred years after emancipation, said King so memorably, "the Negro is not free." Last November 4, as Barack Obama strode onto the stage in Grant Park in Chicago, something in excess of 50 percent of the people all over America were cheering or weeping uncontrollably. In his speech that night, Obama declared his political lineage by invoking King as well as Lincoln. The next morning in The New York Times, the columnist Thomas Friedman declared November 4 the day the Civil War ended in America. As the sesquicentennial nears, we are likely to witness the foolishness of Friedman's exuberant claim. With jobless numbers soaring and the poverty rate among all children predicted to reach 27 percent in the next year — and among African-American children, a frightening 50 percent — we should declare nothing truly ended in our history.
Legacies can take endless forms — physical, political, literary, emotional. This time, we must commemorate our Civil War in all its meanings, but above all we must commemorate and understand emancipation as its most enduring challenge. This time, the fighting of the Civil War itself should not unite us in pathos and nostalgia alone; but maybe, just maybe, we will give ourselves the chance to find unity in a shared history of conflict, in a genuine sense of tragedy, and in a conflicted memory stared squarely in the face.