[Link] Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? - Magazine - The Atlantic
The political writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has been blogging about the American Civil War for several years now. Central to his investigation of the conflict is the disconnect between its primary result — the destruction of a slave society and the liberation from centuries of bondage of millions of Americans — and the country’s retrospective outlook on it.
For starters there’s the Lost Cause, the idea that the South’s army of gentlemen soldiers were fighting for the safety of their homes and their right to determine their own destiny, led by one of the greatest people in all of human history, General Robert E. Lee, and defeated only by Northern brutality, money, and sheer strength of numbers. In this narrative, slavery is an incidental element rather than the cause of the war (which it was, as any number of primary documents from both sides will tell you).
But even without resorting to the Lost Cause and its toxic legacy of the Klan, Jim Crow, the Southern Strategy and so on, the prevailing sentiment even among those who aren’t apologists for the Confederacy is that the War was a regrettable misunderstanding, the result of a failure to communicate, a tragic pitting of brother against brother and father against son, an even over which we honor the valor of the dead on both sides and mourn their losses equally. As a black man, Coates finds this just as hard to take. This, he argues, was his people’s Revolutionary War — a war in which many blacks took up arms and fought against their former or would-be enslavers, by the way. (As a side pursuit, Coates is indefatigable in debunking the all too widely accepted notion that blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy as well.) Why, he asks, is it not celebrated like the Revolutionary War is in this country? Why is it not valorized the way so many of America’s wars are valorized (to a fault)?
In short, Coates believes, as he put it on his blog today, that “The Civil War Isn’t Tragic.” For him, the freeing of a race from another race can’t possibly be something you look back on with rueful regret.
As a 21st-century white American man, I have the luxury of not needing to confront this issue all that urgently. But Coates’s writing on this topic has raised conflicting feelings in me for quite some time. On the one hand, he’s obviously right: A conscious effort on the part of Southerners over the course of 150 years has glamorized the Confederacy and minimized its atrocities and that of the slave society it was formed to preserve forever. It has pushed the issue of slavery to the margins in favor of nonsense like tariff disputes and states’ rights and a culture clash between farming and industry, when any politician or general on either side at the time could tell you what the war was about, and often did so, in letters and writings we can examine today. And indeed, the Civil War can and should be seen as a vital part of the American project of universal sufferage, and as a direct outgrowth of our Founding Fathers’ colossal failure to address the issue properly decades before it broke out. (Although as Coates points out, for Africans, the war began long before that, and was being waged against them daily.)
But war is tragic. That’s what war is. However nobly intentioned, however ameliorative the result, when people decide to resolve their differences by murdering people in quantity, that’s a tragic thing. I understand what Coates is saying, of course. But to me, the answer is not to deny the tragedy of the Civil War, but to acknowledge the tragedy of all wars. Then we can talk about the particulars of this one. And an honest accounting thereof would surely include the war white Americans waged against black Americans for century after century, before and since. But that makes this a tragedy compounded, not a non-tragedy.
Anyway, what this has to do with this blog should be pretty obvious by now, I suppose. If you think it necessary to take up arms against the Lannisters, or the Greyjoys, or the wildlings, or the slave cities…it’s possible you’re right. But the tragedy of war, the gargantuan loss of human potential inherent in the slain and the maimed and the broken and the displaced, should always be taken into account.
