On April 12, 1861, Confederate cannons fired on Ft. Sumter, South Carolina, commencing the worst conflict in our nation’s history. The Civil War appeared to be the early end to the Great Experiment. Four years later, President Lincoln would call its conclusion a “new birth of freedom.” It was also the inevitable result of our founders’ inability to resolve the issue of slavery, thus pitting a large sector of our nation’s economy squarely in conflict with the ideals of our founding documents.
I don’t believe it is possible to understand the United States of America apart from the Civil War. No matter how far in the historical rearview mirror that conflict recedes, it will always be just behind us. Rearview mirrors in our cars carry a message: “objects closer than they appear.” The Civil War will always loom in the American consciousness. You could even argue that the Civil War is more important to our self-understanding than the Revolutionary War. This is why millions visit Gettysburg National Military Park every year while only thousands come to Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, or Yorktown, Virginia.
The aftermath of the war extended far beyond Reconstruction in the Old Confederacy. It continued to shape the unfolding story of both the South and the North economically, culturally and religiously for the next century. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, a hundred years after the battle of Gettysburg, reminded America that the promise of Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” was still incomplete. The Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965 were the legislative fulfillment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, all passed within five years of the end of the Civil War but denuded by segregation laws in the Southern states.
Myth-making is positive, even necessary, when it provides a narrative that gives positive meaning to a culture or group of people. In my view, President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address provided the outline for a new American narrative that continues to inform positive movements for social change today. It is the narrative of a nation founded on ideals that are always ahead of us, always calling us forward. The United States, in other words, is always a work in progress, striving toward the ideals of true liberty and equality.
But myth-making is unhealthy when it is an intentional effort to mis-remember history. Many Americans (not just Southerners) have mythologized the Civil War as the great America tragedy that produced the religion of the “Lost Cause,” as Charles Reagan Wilson calls it, a revival movement to restore the ante-bellum golden age. Despite clear statements to the contrary in the Articles of Succession, Southern leaders, including Confederacy President Jefferson Davis, claimed that the “War Between the States” had nothing to do with slavery, but represented the unjust aggression of industrial northerners on the genteel culture of the agricultural South. On the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, white veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies met to shake hands and declare an end to their differences. President Woodrow Wilson congratulated them on their newfound unity, and speak of the Civil War without ever mentioning the word “slavery.” Even today, the most visited landmark on the Gettysburg battlefield is the monument to the losing Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, while the monument to the Union general, George Meade, is largely ignored. The stone fence that represents “the high water mark of the Confederacy” is now revered as hallowed ground.
I was raised in a religious tradition known as the Southern Baptist Convention, which split away from Northern Baptists in 1845. The deciding issue was the refusal of the Triennial Convention, the national expression of Baptists, to appoint a slave owner from Georgia as a missionary overseas. The delegates of the convention, seeking to maintain a position of neutrality on the issue of slavery, simply refused to act on the appointment. But Southerners interpreted their refusal as an anti-slavery stance, and promptly voted to form their own society for the appointment of missionaries.
The debacle of the Civil War left the SBC, like all Southern institutions, in shambles. Its only seminary was forced to close. During Reconstruction, Southern Baptists embraced and refined the religion of the Lost Cause. The SBC saw itself as “God’s last and only hope.” Institutional aggrandizement, therefore, became critical to proving to America, and ultimately to the world, the moral superiority of Southern culture. By concentrating its energy on its own numerical and financial growth, the SBC sought revenge for the loss of the war. Historian Bill Leonard says that the “passion for triumph, for spiritual and numerical success among Southern Baptists cannot be understood apart from the surrender at Appomattox.” Not until 1995 would the SBC acknowledge and apologize for its racist beginnings.
The long aftermath of the Civil War powerfully shaped my youth. I grew up in a segregated Southern town where the "n" word was acceptable, even in church. When Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee, the woman sitting next to my mother at church choir rehearsal remarked, “Well, that’s too bad, but it’s probably for the best.”
I entered public schools the same year forced busing came to our hometown. So I was always in class with black children who – though I didn’t know it at the time – were riding the bus all the way across town to formerly all-white schools so that we were in compliance with federal law. I became fast friends with Chester Taylor. At recess, Chester and I were usually left alone while the other children segregated themselves into black and white pick-up games.
My family attended a church whose pastor was an outspoken advocate for Civil Rights. After a particularly bold sermon, a deputy sheriff in attendance that day was so full of rage that he decked the pastor on the portico of the sanctuary after the service. Clergy colleagues branded our pastor as a “liberal.” In those days in Southern culture, the epithet of being “liberal” meant you were supportive of civil rights for black people. That was all it meant.
One of the ironies of Southern religion, of course, was that black and white Christians were reading the same Bible, singing the same hymns, and listening to the same energetic style of preaching that emerged from the revivals of the 19th century. The same piety that justified racism on religious grounds was also the impetus for the 20th century’s greatest religious revival – the Civil Rights movement.
All of this history is in my blood. Remembering correctly the tragic history of slavery and racial discrimination is absolutely critical to, not only my understanding of my nation’s history, but also my self-understanding. Misrepresentation of the Civil War and glorification of the ante-bellum South – a terrible affront to every African-American – is also personally offensive to me. Lincoln’s narrative of a nation struggling to live up to its founding ideals, even at the price of a bloody Civil War, is personally moving to me.
As our nation marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, Christians are approaching Holy Week, the remembrance of another April week some 2000 years ago when Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. There would be efforts to mis-remember what really happened that week. Blame for his death would be misplaced. Rumors would spread that he didn’t really die or that his resurrection was nothing more than a pious fraud. But the narrative that survived and changed the world reminds us that Jesus’ death was not simply a political execution at a tense moment in Jewish history. It revealed the sinfulness of all humanity as well as the self-sacrificing love of God. The story of the resurrection is an unfolding narrative, not unlike Lincoln’s idea of America being a work in progress. Christ’s resurrection was “first fruits,” and the redemptive work of God in the risen Christ continues. And the story of Holy Week, in all its tragedy and glory, is essential to our identity as Christians. So let us remember it, feel it, and internalize it honestly.
The attack on Ft. Sumter is not a day to glorify anything, but to mourn a tragic past from which the struggle for freedom was born anew. The death of Jesus is similarly a day to mourn a tragic death from which God brought forth the hope of resurrection.
Copyright 2011 by J. Mark Lawson
Great post. You link Lent and the anniversary of the Civil War together beautifully, and I always enjoy your writing on the "darker" periods in the Christian calendar.
I hope you have the chance to read the title article in Time magazine this week, which speaks to several of the same points about the evolution of the American perspective on the Civil War and slavery. Anyone who thinks that slavery wasn't the root cause ought to take a look at the Constitution of the Confederate States and the speeches given by the Vice President Alexander Stephens on the subject. They're rather explicit in what their motivations were.
Posted by: Madeline | 04/15/2011 at 02:43 PM