It’s a pity that sometimes the best solution to a political conflict is simply not practical. There is such a solution to the Confederates monuments conflict, but there is zero chance of its being agreed to and implemented. What is this best but impossible solution? It’s simple: Take down all the Civil War military monuments in public spaces. That’s right, all of them—Grant and Sherman as well as Lee and Forrest—and move them, if we must, to teachable-moments museum or parks settings. That’ll never happen, but it should—and here is why.
As Thomas Friedman had the courage to say a few weeks ago, just because Donald Trump says something doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s a rare event, true, but it’s happened again—even amid a lot of other things Trump said after Charlottesville that were very wrong. What he said, or tried to say, that was not wrong is that the two-dimensional contemporary depiction of the historical background to the Confederate monuments controversy—namely the Civil War—is much too clearer-than-the-truth. And yes, there is behind this two-dimensional narrative an effort, now many decades old, by some on the radical fringe of the American adversary culture to demonize the American Founding itself.
Now, very few of those who find the Confederate military statues distasteful share this objective, but they are useful to those antifa activists who mostly do avow this objective. The same is true on the other side of the argument: Few of those who take offense at the caricaturing of the contemporary South are neo-Nazis or white supremacists, but neo-Nazis and white supremacists find these offended souls useful. In short, we have a dialectic of polarization playing out before us, where radical groups aim to politically weaponize larger numbers of more-or-less normal patriotic Americans into unwittingly serving a radical cause. This sort of thing can easily get out of hand, especially at a time when the President cares only about nurturing his personal base and not a fig for what is best for the nation.
Thanks to this ballooning dialectic, in recent weeks we have been witness to the primetime revival of arguments we’ve not heard so much of in many decades. So we have the President’s lawyer defending Robert E. Lee, claiming he’s no different from fellow slaveholding Virginians George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as a way to defend President Trump’s slippery slope argument that there’s no logical stopping point to the politically correct Left’s desire to rescind the honor of many of America’s Founders. Trump didn’t mention it, but do anti-Confederate activists aspire to destroy the chapel at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where Lee is buried? (It’s quite a sight, if you’ve never been there.) I suspect that, yes, they do.
And then, in response, we have a series of rebuttals—from Jon Meachem, Max Boot, and others—claiming that Lee and the Confederates were actually the opposites of Washington, Jefferson, George Mason and others because they violated their oaths and sought to destroy, not preserve, the Union.
Alas, both arguments are, as already suggested, clearer than the truth, as Acheson once put it. There is some truth in both arguments, but that’s not so much the point. The point is that it’s dangerous to be having this argument at all right now. Before long, if this continues, we’ll have dug even deeper into a still-infested historical pit, resurrecting points of view that were extreme in their time before 1860 about the Constitutional right to secession, Abolitionist justification of domestic terrorism in the name of emancipation (read: John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry), and more besides.
We should not want to go there. One Civil War was enough. But go there we may, because the veneer is wearing away from the exceptionalist narrative that managed to interpret the disaster of the Civil War in a manner that Americans could live with in the long aftermath. We see that veneer wearing thin in the fact that both the sitting and previous President, though elected from different constituencies within the electoral whole, do not endorse sincerely the exceptionalist narrative as did all their predecessors. And if raw truth makes its way out of its mythic sepulcher, it will show the scabs that remain—reminding enough people of the blood that once flowed, and showing them that the end of the war was not the same as the end of the bitterness.
What is that raw truth—the stuff you were never taught in civic class—and what is the mythic solution (that you were more or less fed in civics class) that saved postbellum Americans from having to see and suffer from it?
To summarize excruciatingly, the raw truth is that antebellum America came to have two intertwined but distinct political economies, the one in the South based on plantation agriculture. That is why and how the southern colonies were set up via land grants from the British crown—they were companies created by the British government for the economic benefit of the government and its supporters, not very different from the motivation behind the East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company, and several others.
That economic enterprise in the South was not viable without slave labor, no less than British, French, and Dutch sugar/rum plantations in the Caribbean were believed unviable without slave labor. The rapid development of the industrial revolution transformed the political economy of the northern states sooner than it began to affect the South, though it did generate the side-effect of increasing northern demand for southern raw materials, like indigo and cotton. Hence, the distinct economic models were intertwined, to the point that northern commerce benefitted handsomely from the southern plantation system. (Didn’t you ever wonder how a college at Yale came to be named for John C. Calhoun in the first place?)
This asymmetrical development, plus shifting congressional mathematics as the frontier was pushed west and new states joined the Union, led to trade tariff and other policies that Southerners feared were turning their states into colonies of the northern elite. It also led to a series of famous deals, like the Missouri Compromise, that tried to maintain a balance in the political system between two economic models that were becoming increasingly asymmetrical. These deals put off the day of reckoning, but they did not obviate it.
Over time, economic perceptions between North and South diverged along with the reality, this despite the fact that racial prejudice did not differ all that much between northern and southern American society before the Civil War. There were plenty of rabid racists in the North just as there were deeply conflicted slaveholders in the South, as the examples of Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Clay, and many others attest. But of course the role of Negro slaves in the political economies of the two regions was dramatically different. Northerners paid no price for basking in moralizing unction; southerners faced different constraints.
This is the reason that old lines of talk contending that the Civil War wasn’t “really” about slavery are neither right nor wrong, but simply make no sense. Economic and racial factors were so intertwined from the start in colonial days that trying to separate the causal strands as time played out is like trying to unweave a corn tassel. Can’t be done. It was about race and it was not about race simultaneously.
So northern politicians mouthing the Abolitionist insistence on emancipation struck most southerners as far more than a purported moral issue; it struck them as an existential economic issue that, many believed, masked an intention by more economically advanced northerners to dominate and exploit them. Since Abolitionist sentiment was clearly a radical minority view in the North, many southerners came to think that northern elites were deploying Abolitionist rhetoric insincerely for selfish reasons.
And look what happened after the war: Not much “magnanimity in victory” (to retrofit Churchill’s sage advice), but instead many years of military occupation, carpet-bagging, exploitation, humiliation, and political exclusion from the Federal realm. This experience reaffirmed the antebellum southern view of the real motives of northern elites. Why would it not have?
And then there was the fairly relaxed northern acceptance of Jim Crow for nearly an entire century after the end of the war: Why would truly sincere Abolitionists, supposedly running the victorious Federal/Union government, allow that? Why, indeed, would northerners all but propose it as part of the dark deal that put Rutherford Hayes in the White House over Samuel J. Tilden—the notorious Compromise of 1877?
Note too that before 1860—when “the United States” was universally conjugated as a plural noun, not a singular one—the idea that sovereign states had a right of secession was not at all far-fetched, and indeed seemed to inhere in the opening lines of the Declaration. And yes, Lee took an oath as a U.S. Army officer to the United States, but he also took, and took seriously, an oath to the Commonwealth of Virginia. The “Union” back then was an instrument that redeemed the failed Articles of Confederation, not a talisman or anything untouchably sacred. That sense of the Union as a holy vessel only came about after the Civil War, as a means to justify the carnage. Looking back from 2017, at a time when the Federal government is in fact sovereign and the states really are not, it’s easy to miss this mid-19th century American reality, but a reality it was.
How did all this raw truth about American antebellum political realities get cooked, devoured, and buried in the course of civil war and aftermath? A then-evolving exceptionalist narrative was deployed to mystify and mythify it. You get the essence by attending to one of Julia Ward Howe’s lyrics for the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, His truth is marching on.”
Get it? Slavery was America’s original sin (although it actually wasn’t—ask any Cherokee or Mohawk), and the bloodletting of the war was America’s necessary crucifixion, enabling the expiation of that sin. Lincoln was Jesus, and so had to suffer and be martyred. After Emancipation, America was “born again.” We live in a very theotropic society still, but 150 years ago we had yet to disguise that fact in a secularized mask, to the point that this interpretation of the war seemed inescapably true to most northerners.
Booting the entire bloodbath, with all its unspeakable savagery, into the transcendent tense is the characteristic way that the American civil religion version of Anglo-Protestantism likes to deal with all of its major failures and unpleasantries. In the mid-1860s that was the only way it could be credibly claimed that one side actually won, that the gruesome bloodletting achieved some higher purpose, when the truth was that everybody lost.
This unfulfilled pseudo-religious fantasy about the Civil War has worked pretty well for a long time. Indeed, the exceptionalist narrative shell that expanded and hardened as a result of the Civil War was further encrusted in more recent times by the transcendentalizing of the “good war,” World War II, and then of the Cold War portrayed, more or less, as a passion play. This piling on over the years makes it easy for the common-folk heirs of military victory in April 1865 to portray the Confederacy and the southern society that supported it in two-dimensional comic book terms. As I’ve tried to suggest, however, things were not so simple; they pretty much never are.
Wiser northern heads in years past understood this, and so implicitly agreed to let the South retain some of its cultural dignity, so long as it was folded beneath the main themes of American life in a subordinate, niche domain—sort of like a regional theme park. The gesture was in every sense a consolation prize. So Joel Chandler Harris could write and thrive, and “Gone with the Wind” could go from being a mediocre novel into a less mediocre film. Southerners could wave their small Stars and Bars banners at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner and even sing “Dixie” if they had a mind and a voice to. No one took it too seriously. It was a reasonable way, evolved over time with mutual gracious nods to fiction, to ameliorate a great tragedy that ought never to have happened.
Indeed, I do not hesitate to say that it would have been better for everyone, including African-Americans, if the war had been somehow prevented, and the problem of slavery dealt with in a more consensual and gradual way—as Henry Clay hoped and had for years worked toward in vain. But that did not happen, so the blood flowed, the scabs formed, and partly as a result racial enmity hardened to become the emotional lightning rod for all subsequent American social conflicts. Maybe that was inevitable in any event; I’m not so sure, but since there’s no way to transform a counterfactual ghost into an empirical object, we’ll never know.
In any event, now the Monuments controversy has become the new vanguard issue of a postmodern Left that aims to repossess the consolation prize, and the reaction to that effort we can all now see—and which truly odious radicals are trying to take to the bank—is really not that hard to understand. But the result is that we face a situation in which the Confederate statues have been sharply politicized with explicit new meaning, and since there’s no erasing that new meaning now they have to go.
Yes, the Reconstruction era ones, the KKK-inspired ones erected in the mid-1920s, and the ones put up in response to the Warren Court’s pressure against segregation—they all need to be moved if they are in a public space. But unless the statues beloved of the Union mystifiers go with them, we invite the return of a very old rawness, and the possible re-militarization of our politics with it.
We need to mitigate the looming repolarization of race and racial politics in America after more than half a century of incomplete but hardly trivial progress, not feed it. This may require some deliberate loss of memory. Alas, there are some conflicts so bitter than the only way to deal with their insolubility is to forget about them. Forgetfulness is an underrated human capability; we could use some of it about now.
Alas, my sense is that this, too, is impossible.
