154 Years Later
Gettysburg never really ended
At two p.m. on July 3, 154 years ago, General James Longstreet reluctantly gave the go-ahead for his Confederate troops to advance against the Union Army across an open field on a blazing hot afternoon. The battle is more or less remembered as an abject failure for the Southern army and, to varying degrees, a turning point for the Union, whose superior numbers, firepower, and defensive positioning carried the day. We remember this event as Pickett’s Charge, the High-water Mark of the Confederacy and the culmination of the Battle of Gettysburg on its third and final day of fighting.
Gettysburg holds prime real estate in American mythology, partly because it was the bloodiest battle in the war, partly because we’re a country without a long history and so mythological real estate is cheap, and partly because it’s easy to project narratives onto the war (and its biggest, most-talked about battle). Depending on your point of view, perhaps the war was a glorious yet doomed struggle for the lost cause of state’s rights, agrarianism, and old-world gentility against the overreach of a centralized government of elites fueled by urban corruption and industrial might — or maybe it was the long-delayed triumph of an American spirit that fights for the good of the oppressed against tyranny and injustice. (Among many other ways you can spin it.)
Some facts, however, are fairly simple: the Confederate army fought to preserve slavery in what comprised the Southern states. They did this because the ownership of other human beings, whom they saw as racially inferior based on some very ill-conceived pseudoscience that this country still hasn’t put to bed, was the supporting pillar of Southern society and economy.
Seeing that the Southern status quo was untenable and its was power slipping in an America growing with immigrants from overseas, expanding into new territories, and rapidly advancing in technology and industry, the power interests in these states tried, through violence, to establish their own country where they could continue to exploit their slaves as well as their poorer white compatriots who made up most of the fighting force and generally supported and benefited from slavery too, even if they didn’t own any themselves — though many more did than Confederate apologists would lead you to believe.
The other side, i.e. the North or the Union, eventually beat the South by having superior industrial backing and technology, cutting off Southern access to resources, and overwhelming the smaller Southern army by throwing waves of immigrants and poor people into the meat grinder. It was an ugly time. But it is perhaps uglier that it actually took the killing of 620,000 soldiers to put an end to the issue of slavery in America.
But that is perhaps the only sure thing we can say we’ve moved on from as a whole in America since the Civil War. Most of the cultural divides still exist, though those divides aren’t as easily split as the Mason-Dixon line once did. Still, noting the similarities between Confederate complaints in 1861 and those of certain American demographics in 2017 is so obvious that to point them out would be ham-fisted and redundant.
Even the ways in which Americans talk and think about the Civil War are telling — as is the simple fact that they don’t know much about it at all. Having high school textbooks note, for example, that the war was caused by slavery is still a controversy. Instead, many prefer to say it was about the economy or states’ rights. (As if one can separate those things from the peculiar institution.) Others have written much more thoroughly than I can here about why those claims are patently false. But the crux is that slavery, exploitation, hypocrisy, and brutality underpinned any more palatable apology about the economy or the US Constitution.
Americans often shake their heads when they hear about how Japanese textbooks don’t acknowledge atrocities committed in China and elsewhere by the Empire during the Second World War. But the US isn’t always much better when it comes to glossing over the bad stuff. Criticism or facts that contradict the onward march of American exceptionalism are still considered taboo in far too many American conversations.
These historical taboos have consequences because they inhibit how we can talk about our present. Slavery, for instance, is a major reason why the US has the Electoral College, a unique, American voting structure that still, over a century and a half after the Civil War, mathematically privileges rural white votes from less dense states.
There is, perhaps, some cold comfort you can take from American history, though. For one, the United States have never been such in reality. The issues that flare up have in large part been there from the time this country was a backwater colony. The American people have come together perhaps over common enemies for brief moments in time— the UK, the Axis, Communism, Islamist terrorism, etc. — but those moments are rare and they haven’t always necessarily been good for the country, either. They make us forget that reasoned debate and reasonable differences are good for America, as they are for any free society. Our differences, by and large, have made us better.
But reasonable differences aren’t the same as ignoring science, demonizing independent journalism, and whitewashing history to make it all more palatable. Debates about what caused the Civil War aren’t merely differences of opinions as they’re carried out in popular political rhetoric; they don’t all have equal validity and the less valid ones are often used to justify present-day abuses.
How we tell stories matters — and just because objective historical truth is impossible doesn’t mean history is a free-for-all. And looking back on the Civil War, we should take heart in the fact that killing each other will fix far fewer problems than having more honest conversations about our already too bloody past.
Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.
