AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
So now we come to the ultimate highlight/lowlight in American history.
The Civil War.
Or, as the Bad Guys referred to it, the War of Northern Aggression.
By the way, those Bad Guys never got a proper comeuppance, other than getting their asses whupped in the war itself. The leaders of the so-called Confederate States of America, as well as that “nation’s” generals, its financiers, philosophers, influencers, clerics, and traders in human lives, never were brought to justice, never punished, never compelled to atone for their myriad sins.
As a rule, I tend to be sympathetic to any group of people who wish to rebel or secede but not so in this case. Sadly, it remains necessary to this day, more than a hundred and sixty years later, here in the United States of America, to say what should be universally accepted — that Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, Judah Benjamin, Robert Toombs, John C. Breckenridge, and their evil collaborators were wrong, morally, existentially wrong, and deserving of the hangman’s noose.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson lays out the particulars of modern America’s inexcusable winking at the secession and subsequent war in her book, How the South Won the Civil War. It’s as if Germans still celebrated Kristallnacht or the Japanese continued to revere the legacy of Hideki Tojo. Even the Soviets tried to wash their hands of the malignant fallout from the Joseph Stalin era in the years immediately after his death. (On the other hand, just as many Americans embrace the antebellum South, romanticize its rebellion, and — honestly — long for a return to a time when dark-skinned people knew their place, a good many Russians today wish their country still had a tyrannical leader like the man whose forced famines, brutal gulags, and thought-crime executions resulted in the deaths of at least 10 million people. In other words, we Americans aren’t the only saps on earth.)
Therein lies the essence of the contradictory highlight/lowlight of the Civil War. Lincoln may have been magnanimous and forgiving in his “with malice toward none” stance. He may have been manifesting the most admirable characteristics of his Christian faith. But he allowed evil to survive by not choking it off, its ideas as well as its purveyors, swiftly and decisively. The way to do that would have been to hang Davis et al from the highest trees and outlawing the Confederate flag.
Unhappily, that banner continues to be waved, on front yard flagpoles, on pickup trucks, on tattoos, on blogs and in podcasts, and anywhere else where people can legally display their stupidity. Again, places like Germany flat-out ban the waving of the Nazi flag. They, at least, understand the normalization of it, just as we normalized the “stars and bars,” is a tacit endorsement of everything it stands for.
That normalized Confederate flag stands for the kidnapping, the buying and selling, the terrorizing, the dehumanization, the whipping, the chaining — all the atrocities inherent in the practice of slavery. The United States of America fought a bloody war to stop that practice. Then it said to its former practitioners, All is forgiven, fellas. You’re okay by us.
They weren’t okay.
How Kidnapped Africans Were Transported to America.
●