Civil War In 'Postracial' America

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24 The Nation. October 10, 2011 The Civil War in ‘Postracial’ America No narrative of the war can ignore the centrality of slavery to its origins and legacy. by ERIC FONER n 1877, soon after retiring as president, Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a two-year tour of the world. At almost every location he was greeted with adulation. In London, the Duke of Wellington, whose father had vanquished Napoleon, praised Grant as a military genius, the architect of victory in one of the greatest wars known to human history. In Newcastle, tens of thousands of parading English workers, arrayed with the banners of their various crafts, hailed him as the man who had saved the world’s leading experiment in democratic self-government and as a Hero of…show more content…
As always, a gap remains between historical scholarship and popular understandings of history. Fifty years ago, when Charleston, South Carolina, marked the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the city was bedecked with Confederate flags and the commemorations made no mention of slavery. This past April, the city fathers and National Park Service sponsored a gathering that included reflections on slavery’s role in the war and on post-slavery race relations. As in 1961, a band played “Dixie,” but this time “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” accompanied it, recognition that a majority of South Carolina’s population (the slaves) sided with the Union, not the Confederacy. But the event attracted far smaller crowds than fifty years ago. Of course, the centennial celebrations of the 1960s took place at the high tide of the civil rights revolution, which underscored the Civil War’s continuing relevance. A century after the war began, passions over the war did not seem to have diminished; at a gathering in April 1961 to mark the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the Headquarters Hotel in Charleston denied accommodations to a black delegate from New Jersey. In response, President Kennedy moved the event to a nearby naval base, whereupon Southern delegates seceded to hold their own Confederate States Centennial…show more content…
In the absence of a vibrant movement for racial justice and in an era that has been labeled “postracial,” the relevance of the Civil War appears far less clear than it did fifty years ago. In 1963 it seemed entirely appropriate for Martin Luther King Jr. to begin his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial with a reference to the unfulfilled promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. Such rhetoric is rarely heard today, when the black freedom struggle, intensely divisive when it took place, has been transformed into a narrative of national unity, a fulfillment of bedrock American principles rather than the “revolution in values” called for by King. Even neo-Confederates portray the Old South as a multicultural paradise of racial harmony and invent imaginary legions of black Confederate soldiers to demonstrate that both sides can claim credit for the end of slavery. In a society in which everyone from Glenn Beck to President Obama assumes the mantle of the civil rights movement, slavery seems not to arouse as much interest as in the past. Polls show that a majority of Americans identify issues other than slavery—states’ rights, the tariff, etc.—as the war’s fundamental cause. Yet contemporaries had little doubt that slavery “somehow” lay at the root of the conflict, as Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural Address, and that Emancipation was its most profound outcome. The Confederacy’s founders
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