Historian says chasm over Civil War persists

From Fredericksburg.com: Historian says chasm over Civil War persists America has a bad case of blurred vision when it comes to the Civil War, one local historian says. That myopia seriously affects how people get along with one another, and what they think the conflict was about, John Hennessy said Sunday during a forum at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg. Hennessy, chief historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, challenged his 100-plus listeners to re-examine traditional ideas of the war’s cause and consequences—for the sake of history, truth and their community. He suggested that many people talk past one other when questions about the war arise, as evidenced daily in National Park Service historians’ interactions with visitors and in letters to the editor published in The Free Lance–Star. “If you say the war was about slavery, then my ancestor was fighting to abolish it. And your ancestor was fighting to preserve it,” he said. “And how does that make you feel?” People dislike such conversations because “those aren’t the noble sentiments that we associate with [Civil War soldiers],” he said. “It’s a very uncomfortable place to be there.” But, Hennessy urged, residents of the Fredericksburg area—and Americans as a whole—must bridge that gulf between them. Believing that the Civil War was waged over the issue of slavery doesn’t mean dishonoring ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, he said. People need to distinguish between soldiers’ personal motivations and the national purposes for which their governments worked, Hennessy said. “There is much that’s American and much that’s virtuous and compelling and inspiring about the Confederacy, but we will always be on opposite sides of the gulf unless we recognize and grapple with this large problem of national purpose.” It’s not a North–South issue, but one of misconceptions about what really happened, he said. The difficulty stems from the late 19th century when, to reconcile the two sections of the country, people “set aside the things that the war was about,” Hennessy said. People chose to focus on the things that united them, not on what still divided them—including issues of race, rights and political power. Such “unseemly things,” in the words of Confederate Gen. John B. Gordon, were shelved, left untouched for generations. Which is why, Hennessy said, Saturday’s local Civil War sesquicentennial program—“Churches Remember”—was “profoundly important.” Honoring facts as well as everyone’s heritage—black and white, Union and Confederate—could help bridge divisions that still separate Americans 150 years after their costliest conflict, he suggested. One lingering price of the nation’s thirst for postwar reconciliation, Hennessy said, that is that many African–Americans are disinterested in—even turned off by—the Civil War. “It is absolutely unjust to take our values and overlay them upon their time,” he said. But it is important to recognize that one legacy of reunion is today’s “disconnect” between the region’s African–American community and stories of the war, emancipation and freedom, Hennessy said. He offered an example. Starting in 1876 or 1878, Memorial Day services at Fredericksburg National Cemetery—repository of Northern dead from six of the area’s Civil War campaigns—were faithfully held by Fredericksburg’s African–Americans, Hennessy noted. They gathered at Shiloh Baptist Church and proceeded up Hanover Street and along Sunken Road to the cemetery. For years, they led the ceremonies and decorated the graves of the men who lay on Willis Hill, Hennessy said. They honored the men “they knew, somehow, had something to do with their freedom.” In 1884, a group of Union veterans decided to join the ceremony. As a gesture of reconciliation, they invited their Confederate counterparts to join them in a shared commemoration honoring the Union dead—“a pretty astonishing step forward,” Hennessy said. But it carried a cost. “The Confederate veterans said yes, but—not surprisingly, given the time—they had a caveat,” he said. “And that was, ‘We will join the ceremony so long as the colored people are not included.’” The North-and-South rite took place, but over the next few years, African–American involvement in the cemetery’s Decoration Day tradition faded away. One modern-day consequence: “In 2010, 2011, 2012, the number of African–American visitors who come to the National Cemetery each year, you can probably count on less than 10 hands,” Hennessy said. That illustrates why, in the remaining years of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, he said he and others hope the Fredericksburg area will have a robust dialogue about race, slavery and the war. “The chasm is rooted in the different ways that people see the war. The chasm is rooted in the stormy problem that, as a matter of policy, one side committed to sustain slavery and the other side—ultimately, reluctantly—adopted a policy to abolish it,” Hennessy said. “That’s the problem. And it is a great challenge for our nation, and our community, to understand that, to work through that issue.”