Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9309030374
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Yet as the reality of the war fades into an ever dimmer past, its symbolic power endures. Exhibit No. 1: The disputes over whether and where the South's flags - the Stars and Bars of the Confederate government or, more often, the battle flag of the Confederate armies - should be displayed.
At the very least, it can be said that much of America remains intrigued by the war.
I can, for example, mention Lee, Grant and Appomattox in the first sentence of this column without further elaboration - and reasonably assume that most readers will know to whom and what I refer. Try that with, say, Gates, Burgoyne and Saratoga.
Civil War battlefields are preserved as national parks. Movies and TV programs about the war, some far more substantial erious endeavors far more substantial than the vulgarly romantic claptrap of a ``Gone With the Wind,'' win wide audiences. The re-enactment of Civil War battles is a subculture of its own.
Meanwhile, the war, the events leading to it, and its aftermath continue to provide fertile ground for historians. The ground has been plowed many times over. New insights have been gained , though, by shedding the racist prisms that distorted older views.
But why all this intensity of late 20th-century American interest in a chapter of history from the mid-19th?
Partly, I suppose, because American soil is unaccustomed to slaughter of such scope. In terms of sheer gore, the United States has witnessed nothing like the Civil War.
Read the account of Antietam in James M. McPherson's superb one-volume histo ry of the war, ``The Battle Cry of Freedom'' (Oxford University Press, 1988) and be both appalled and fascinated.
When the battle was over, writes McPherson, ``(n)ight fell on a scene of horror beyond imagining.'' On the Maryland farmland west of Washington, ``(n)early 6,000 men lay dead or dying, and another 17,000 wounded groaned in agony or endured in silence.''
The toll at Antietam, notes McPherson, was four times the number of U.S. casualties on the Normandy beaches on D-Day; it was twice the number of American dead than the entire total for the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War combined.
You can't help wondering: What did these people think they were doing?
But there's more going on than morbid fascination. To contemplate the Civil War without bringing up slavery, and to ponder contemporary American interest in the war without taking thought of subsequent race relations, would be rather like discussing communism without mentioning Karl Marx.
Some things are, well, basic - and the basic fact about the Civil War is that, whatever other motivations may have existed among each of the millions caught up in its violence, the issue was the survival of the South's ``peculiar institution.''
You don't try to dissolve a nation, nor do you precipitate inevitable war, simply to prove abstract debating points about constitutional theory. You do it because you think your fundamental, concrete interests demand it.
The white South, whether or not individual white Southerners happened to be slaveowners, saw in the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln the death knell of a social and economic system they couldn't imagine living without.
The white North saw in the Southern ``slavocracy'' a grave threat not just to the Union but also to the ability of free white labor to compete. Only a relatively few Northerners saw abolition as a morally worthy end in itself; many more, however, backed the Republicans' opposition to the extension of slavery to the Western territories.
That the war was about slavery's future was well understood at the time, as Alan T. Nolan notes in the last chapter of his revisionist ``Lee Considered'' (The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.)
Not until after the war did the South (and, a few years later, the North) find it inconvenient to keep this in mind. For the battered psyches of white Southerners, converting a failed defense of slavery into a noble Lost Cause was a natural defense mechanism. It wouldn't have been much solace to think hard about how the cause deserved to be lost.
Obviously, memories (by this late date, of course, vicarious) of the war still carry emotional weight. The flag flaps bear testimony to that.
In South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, the practice of flying Confederate flags at the statehouses has been a hot political issue. In Stafford, near Fredericksburg, a judge's objections led to removal of flags of the South from a courthouse display of flags that had flown over in Virginia. Here in Roanoke, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed an objection to the banning of such flags a couple of years ago at a parade in Lexington.
The ACLU is clearly right about one point: Waving the flags of a long-gone Confederacy, whose reason for existence was to preserve an odious system of of human slavery indeed is a form of political speech. However odious the viewpoint expressed, it deserves First Amendment protection.
By the same token, however, the official display of Confederate flags by agencies of government can't be dismissed as merely a bit of nostalgia. The First Amendment guarantees the right of private citizens to express their political views; it does not require government to endorse them. But they have no business flying over state capitol buildings.
by CNB