Professor David Blight:
I'm going to talk for a few
minutes about this memory
question.
There's an article assigned at
the very end of the reading
packet that you perhaps have
read by now, I hope.
A piece I wrote some years ago
which gives you kind of a breezy
take on some of the complexities
of how the Civil War and
Reconstruction have been
remembered in the United States.
It is arguably the most vexing
piece of our past for our larger
political, public culture to
process.
You can simply do it this way,
though.
This is one of the people that
Tony Horwitz interviewed in his
wonderful book Confederates
in the Attic,
which some of you may have
read.
A quite popular book;
it came out about five years
ago.
Horwitz, a great journalist,
did a travel book all over the
South and tried to come to some
grips and understanding of many
things,
but particularly of Civil War
buffs and Civil War
enthusiasm--of why this event
endures so much in our popular
culture.
Among the people he interviewed
was this guy who said,
quote: "I think there's a lot
of people like me who want to
get back to a simpler time:
sandlot baseball,
Cowboys and Indians,
and the Civil War."
Just take me away.
Wherever my present is,
whatever my life is,
just transport me,
to the morning of July 3^(rd)
at Gettysburg,
or some other place.
There was a musician
interviewed on NPR yesterday
morning who's been through a
horrible life of drugs and
alcohol addiction.
At the end of it he was asked
to give the biggest influences
on his recovery and his
survival,
and he said,
"Well, certain artists,
certain people,
but mostly the Civil War."
And that's where the interview
ended.
I was dying to find out what
the hell did that mean?
Good God Almighty.
But God bless him.
All right, legacies.
Everything in history has a
legacy.
We use the term all the time,
the legacies of this;
the legacies of that;
the legacies of that event;
what are the legacies of World
War Two?
What are the legacies of the
Civil Rights Movement?
But what is a legacy?
Stop for just a second with me.
Let me attempt a definition,
some attempt.
It can be simply another word
for historical memory,
of how we remember things,
and then how we use them.
It always carries some current,
present, and often political
meaning.
If you use the term legacy for
something, it probably has a
current political stake.
Reconstruction,
in our history,
was an ongoing referendum on
the meaning and legacies of
slavery in the Civil War.
And so much of our racial
history, our constitutional
history, our political history,
ever since Reconstruction,
has been a referendum on the
meaning and memory of
Reconstruction.
Was there a reconciliation in
the wake of these events,
of sections,
of states,
of soldiers,
of the political class,
or of masters and slaves,
blacks and whites?
Who got reconciled and who
didn't?
Legacies, I'd suggest,
can be emotional.
Test this with your parents or
your grandparents.
Legacies can be emotional,
they can be intellectual,
they can be physical,
they can be financial,
they can be about habits,
they surely can be political,
and they can be sacred or
secular.
My parents were the Great
Depression and World War Two
generation and it was all over
them.
My father always feared
insurance.
He always wanted to know
exact--he had no money but he
always wanted to know exactly
where his money was.
He almost kept it under a
pillow.
It was stupid,
it was crazy,
but after the Depression and
five farm foreclosures that his
family had,
he couldn't stand letting
anyone else have his couple of
thousand dollars.
That's a legacy of the Great
Depression.
It's a habit,
it's a point of view and it's a
set of assumptions.
This event had so many legacies
that frankly we just keep adding
to them with time.
They just don't really go away.
Sometimes a legacy is perhaps
what is simply left over,
out in public memory,
in our behavior,
in our policies,
after historians have written
all their books,
museums have mounted all their
exhibitions, teachers have
taught their classes,
elders have tried to instruct
the young, at the grassroots
level and in families.
The legacy is that which
endures all of our filterings,
all of our debates,
all of our struggles over
controlling the story we say we
live in.
It is where the past and the
present meet.
And there's no event in
American history that's caused
more of these struggles--there
are others that compare--but
there's no others that's caused
more struggles over just how the
past and present meet than our
Civil War.
Just take some of these ideas
as physical legacies,
emotional legacies.
If you took the number of dead
in the American Civil War and
you moved it to the present per
capita,
thirteen million Americans
would die in a war today.
Slavery was gone,
anger at its loss had no end.
In the South,
the economy and the physical
landscape was in collapse.
Two-thirds of Southern wealth
of the ex-Confederate states was
destroyed, in four years,
and a lot of that wealth,
of course, was slaves;
three-and-a-half billion
dollars worth.
Forty percent of all Southern
livestock were dead at the end
of the war.
Fifty percent of all farm
machinery destroyed.
There was an enormous refugee
problem.
Mobilization had occurred
unmatched;
it will be unmatched until
World War Two.
And in the South,
in particular,
the war had killed
approximately--killed or
incapacitated,
excuse me--one of every four
males from the age of sixteen to
forty-five.
How do you process that kind of
loss and destruction and
violence in a society that must
find a way to reconcile?
You can't send the defeated
part somewhere else;
well could've tried but Brazil
wouldn't take them all,
certainly Britain wouldn't take
them all, Mexico
couldn't--wouldn't.
How would this reconciliation
actually come?
I was doing research at
Huntington Library a couple of
years ago.
I was actually there to give a
lecture and I had two days to
kill and I was just playing
around in the Allan Nevins
Papers;
Allan Nevins was a great Civil
War historian,
back in the '50s and '60s.
I grew up reading his works.
And I was actually giving a
lecture named for Allan Nevins,
so I thought I'd spend a couple
of days in the Nevins Papers and
just lose myself.
There's nothing better in the
world, other than teaching this
class, than losing yourself in a
great library for two days,
with no agenda.
And I'm thumbing through the
Nevins Papers,
it's a huge collection,
and I just bump into an essay,
in manuscript form,
by my hero, Bruce Catton.
I've mentioned him before.
I grew up reading his books,
Stillness at Appomattox,
and so many others;
the great popular historian of
the Civil War in the '50s,
'60s, '70s.
And here was this little essay,
by Catton, entitled "The End of
the Centennial,
1965."
Note the date,
the centennial of the U.S.
Civil War.
Catton and Nevins had been
themselves directors,
executive-directors,
presidents and vice-presidents,
whatever they were called,
of the U.S.
Centennial Commission for the
Civil War, a commission that was
in many ways a debacle because
it was all occurring--again,
think of the dates--at the time
of the Civil Rights Movement.
Anyway, I had just published a
book on Civil War memory,
this long tome,
and here comes this little
essay,
and I was thinking,
oh, Bruce Catton,
I'm sure he'll agree with me.
Huh.
Now in this essay,
which was later published I
discovered--and Catton wrote it
in 1965--he muses about memory,
and he used the actual word
memory.
That was reassuring because I
was writing about memory in a
world of academics who were
always--were very suspicious
about what the hell this idea of
memory was supposed to mean.
He marveled in this piece at
how Americans had healed--that
was his word--from their Civil
War, from this kind of
blood-letting;
how a nation over a hundred
years had healed,
he said.
And that a nation could
actually commemorate a civil
war, so openly,
all over the landscape,
he said was truly remarkable,
if not unprecedented in modern
history.
The war, he said,
was--his word--a source of
unity.
"The memory of our civil
war"--and I'm quoting Bruce
Catton, 1965--"has not been a
divisive force in this country."
And I had one of those moments
where I said,
oh God, Bruce,
say it ain't so;
you didn't say that.
Reminded me of the time I ran
into my greatest baseball hero
ever, in an airport--you
probably don't even know him,
Al Kaline, the right fielder
for the Detroit Tigers,
the one and only Al Kaline;
only Roberto Clemente could
even come close to Kaline as a
right-fielder.
I ran him into an airport once,
end of his career--and I was
about 28--and he was smoking a
cigarette.
Damn.
Don't meet your heroes.
How could Bruce have written
that sentence?
I'd just written a 500-page
book that argued exactly the
opposite.
For forging all this unity--I
read on in the essay--for
forging all this unity he gave
most of the credit to Grant and
Lee at Appomattox and the nature
of the surrender;
the compassionate character of
that surrender at Appomattox.
But then he went on.
He said primarily he gave
credit to what he called the
Confederate legend,
which he described as--and I'm
quoting him: "a mighty,
omnipresent force in the land.
In all seriousness"--still
quoting Catton--"the legend of
the Lost Cause has been an asset
to the entire country."
Now that just blew me away.
Oh Bruce, please tell me you
didn't write that.
Catton's portrayal of the Lost
Cause in this essay was that of
a benign, innocent,
romantic cluster of legends
about the Old South,
driven by the assumption,
as he put it,
that, quote:
"no hint of enmity should ever
be kept alive."
His Lost Cause,
in the brevity of one essay,
was a story of noble sacrifice
by the South,
and heroism,
of a nostalgia for an older
civilization that had been some
kind of bulwark against
modernism.
And in the end,
as Catton put it,
the Confederate legend,
the Lost Cause,
he said, quote,
"saved us."
I couldn't really take it
anymore.
At the very end of the essay
Catton redeemed himself a bit.
He acknowledged that in 1965
the war had left,
he said, the unfinished
business of black equality as
its deepest legacy,
and that, quote,
"the Negro was what the war was
about, somehow."
Now that was probably--given
how closely Catton knew Lincoln,
loved Lincoln--that was
probably a riff on Lincoln's use
of the word 'somehow' in the
Second Inaugural,
where Lincoln says,
"somehow, all knew the war was
about slavery."
And we've been trying to
explain that somehow in our 65
to 70,000 books on the
Civil--well some of them
have--ever since.
Now, I remember rising up from
that thinking well I just lost
another hero.
How could Bruce Catton have
said all this?
Well for one thing he never did
any research on the Lost Cause.
He didn't know the Lost Cause.
He didn't know that the Lost
Cause became essentially a
racial ideology,
that it became a cluster of
legends,
as he put it,
but a cluster of legends in the
service of white supremacy,
a few assumptions in search of
a history,
and an ideology that came to be
the buttressing,
the base of Jim Crow America.
But then I started thinking
more and more,
and I began to realize,
don't be emotional about this,
Bruce Catton was actually in
1965 capturing,
absolutely capturing,
the mainstream American
conception of the Lost Cause and
of Civil War memory.
That the South's heroism,
that the Confederacy's effort
to stake all on the line for its
independence,
that the glorious figure of a
Robert E.
Lee, the steadfastness of a
Jefferson Davis,
had indeed become national
phenomena.
Catton was just summing up the
mainstream of American thought
by the 1960s.
And that old cliché
that you've heard,
perhaps before many times,
that the South lost the war but
won the peace,
or the South lost the war but
won the debate over the memory,
was basically what Catton was
summing up.
I think Catton believed this
too.
But I let him off the hook.
Because by circa 1965 the
understanding of the American
Civil War in the broad
mainstream culture--not among
most African-Americans--and now
a new young generation of
historians who came of age in
the wake of World War Two and
were deeply interested in the
problem of race in American
history as never before,
and deeply inspired by an
anthropological,
sociological,
psychological revolution in the
study of race,
were beginning to write about
it differently.
The great Southern poet,
who lived much of his life,
much of the second half of his
life,
right here, and whose papers
are right there,
at Beinecke,
Robert Penn Warren,
wrote brilliantly about this in
a little book,
a little essay--actually a big
essay in a little book--that he
wrote in 1961 called The
Legacy of the Civil War.
He wrote it for Life
magazine.
It was later published as a
book.
In that book,
trying to capture what the
meaning of the Civil War was in
American culture 100 years
after,
Penn Warren said that
"somewhere in their bones"--and
I quote him--"most Americans
have a storehouse of lessons
drawn from the Civil War."
Now exactly what those lessons
should be has been,
I think, the most contested
question in America's historical
memory,
over and over again,
at least since 1865 and
probably even since 1863,
when the war underwent a
revolution.
"Among all the possible lessons
of our Civil War," wrote Robert
Penn Warren,
"is the realization"--his
words--"that slavery looms up
mountainously in the story and
cannot be talked away."
Our culture has spent nearly
now a century and a half,
and it is still at it,
of talking away the place of
slavery in this event and its
place in the aftermath.
"When one is happy in
forgetfulness," said Penn
Warren, "facts get forgotten."
Or as William Dean Howells put
in 1900--and I think I quote
this in the essay you've
read--what the American people
always like is a tragedy,
as long as they can give it a
happy ending.
We have a tragic sensibility as
a culture, as long as we can see
an exit from it.
All right, let me just give you
three hooks to hang your hat on,
in terms of how Americans have
processed this memory.
I've labeled them
reconciliationist,
white supremacist and
emancipationist,
and they simply mean this.
There are some other ways of
thinking about how Civil War
memory was processed,
but most of them can come under
these categories.
A reconciliationist vision of
this war took root in the midst
of the war.
It took root especially in
dealing with all the dead.
And Drew Faust's new book on
this, called Republic of
Suffering,
is a must-read,
if you stay interested in this
subject.
I'm conducting an interview
with her tomorrow night in New
York about that book.
I've talked to so many people
who keep telling me they can't
read past page fifty because
it's so depressing.
And I usually say something
stupid like, "It's good for you.
Take your pill."
The reconciliationist vision of
this war, somehow putting
ourselves back together,
is rooted right there in
putting bodies back together and
in putting hundreds of thousands
of bodies in the ground.
In Faust's book,
as never before,
we are taken literally into
those graves.
She has found tremendous
evidence of what soldiers
themselves did on battlefields
to bury their own dead,
and sometimes even bury the
enemy, to give people decent,
human burials after they'd been
half eaten by dogs.
Nothing like burying a dead man
without a coffin,
on a battlefield that you've
known, will make you pray and
beg to be reconciled with
something.
But a second kind of Civil War
memory, if we can call it that,
was the white supremacist
memory,
which took many forms early,
including, of course,
the terror and violence of the
Klan and its many imitators,
in Reconstruction,
and then locked arms
eventually, in the later
nineteenth century and into the
twentieth century,
with reconciliationists of all
kinds in our culture,
and delivered the country a
racially segregated memory,
a racially segregated story of
this experience,
at least by 1900,
and really even before.
A third kind of memory,
always competing with these,
we might call an
emancipationist memory,
embodied in African-Americans,
complex--and they had no single
memory of slavery,
the war, emancipation and
Reconstruction--in their own
complex remembrance of what
slavery and their freedom had
meant to them.
But an emancipationist vision
of the Civil War was also rooted
in the politics of Radical
Reconstruction,
also rooted in the three
Constitutional amendments,
and conceptions of the war as a
re-invention of the Republic,
and the liberation of blacks to
citizenship--blacks and
eventually others--to
Constitutional equality.
In the end what you have here
is the story eventually of how
the forces of reconciliation
overwhelmed that emancipationist
vision in the national culture,
and how an inexorable drive for
reunion of North and South,
both used race and then trumped
it.
But the story doesn't just
dead-end in this white supremacy
victory, this Lost Cause
victory,
because eventually the Lost
Cause wasn't about causes lost
at all.
The Lost Cause ideology of the
South became a victory
narrative, and the victory,
they argued,
was a national victory over
Reconstruction.
If you want to ask what was the
biggest success in the long
struggle over Civil War memory,
it was the success of the Lost
Cause ideology in selling
themselves to northerners who
bought in and said,
"yes, the nation has finally
triumphed over the mistake of
Reconstruction."
But there was a fledgling
neo-abolitionist tradition,
that emancipationist vision of
the Civil War never died a
permanent death in American
culture,
by any means,
kept alive by blacks,
black leadership,
and white allies.
There is a persistence of that
memory that, frankly folks,
made possible the Civil Rights
Revolution of the '50s and '60s,
and it was happening even
before the '50s.
But if one thing in particular
happened to the memory of the
Civil War, it found it its way
eventually into a broad
consensus,
in the broader national
culture--this was never
unanimous of course--but in the
broader national culture that
somehow,
in this war,
in this Armageddon,
in this blood-letting,
everybody had been right and
nobody had been wrong.
You want to reconcile a country
that's had a horrifying civil
war, how do you do it?
Well, you start building
thousands upon thousands of
monuments.
You start having soldier
reunions.
You've read about the
Gettysburg Reunion in this essay
of mine;
I won't even go into that,
the biggest of all the
Blue-Grey Reunions,
which became the Jim Crow
Reunion by 1913.
And Ken Burns did not tell you
that in his film,
and played a very interesting
trick on you with that editing
button by showing you black and
white veterans at the 1913
Reunion shaking hands--an
irresistible,
beautiful, emotional moment.
The trouble is those veterans
were shaking hands 25 years
later, in 1938,
at the New Deal Reunion at
Gettysburg.
They weren't there in 1913,
but in the film that's
certainly what it looks like.
The power of filmmaking.
There was a popular novel
published in 1912--there were a
zillion popular novels published
about the Civil War.
But this one was by a Southern
woman writer,
a very interesting writer we
don't read much today,
if anybody reads her,
although she was important in
her time.
Her name was Mary Johnston.
She was a Virginian,
born to the upper crust of
Virginia planter life,
born just after the war.
She was imbued with the Lost
Cause tradition,
but grew up wanting to
interrogate it a little bit.
She was a Lost Causer but she
asked questions about it.
She became a suffragist.
A progressive woman in so many
ways.
She wrote a trilogy of Civil
War books.
Her most famous book,
and it was a huge bestseller,
was called To Have and to
Hold.
But one of her trilogy is a
novel called Cease
Firing, which also was a
near bestseller.
And in Cease Firing,
on the last page of the book,
she has Lee's Army retreating
from Richmond,
out toward their surrender at
Appomattox.
And she's a good writer.
And literally,
on the last two pages,
she has two Confederate
soldiers, in their rags,
half- starved,
in conversation.
And one of these old veterans
asks the other what he thinks it
all means--"what's it all about
brother?"
And the other answers and says,
"I think that we were both
right, and both wrong,
and that in the beginning each
side might've been more patient
and much wiser.
Life and history,
and right and wrong,
in the minds of men,
look out of more windows than
we used to think.
Did you never hear of the
shield that had two sides and
both were made of precious
metal?"
Why didn't we just get along?
We were both right.
Now, that's an honest sentiment
she puts in the mouths of a
half-starved Confederate veteran
who's lucky to be alive and is
now either about to desert or
surrender to the Union Army,
neither option of which he ever
hoped to live to have to face.
And she also captures in that
moment a very honest sentiment
that had set in all over
American culture,
especially in veterans'
culture, at all those Blue-Grey
Reunions--and the Gettysburg
Blue-Grey Reunion was about to
occur the following year after
this book was published--and
that is this sense of the
mutuality of sacrifice among
soldiers.
Cure the hatreds of war by
bringing the warriors together,
because they have a mutuality
of experience.
And there was,
of course, no lack of honor at
Appomattox, on either side.
But outside of all that pathos,
that understanding,
that sentiment that Americans
had bought into by the millions,
there was, of course,
another whole story going on,
out in American culture and in
national memory.
In 1912, the NAACP counted
seventy-two lynchings,
in America;
about ninety percent of whom
were African-Americans.
By 1912, when that book was
published, the entire Jim Crow
legal system and all of its
absurdities was fully in place,
roughly by about 1910,
across the South and in some of
the border states,
and to some extent even in the
North.
An erasure of cultural,
historical, mnemonic erasure,
had been going on for three,
four and five decades,
of emancipation,
from the national narrative of
what this war had even ever been
about.
That process led the great
black scholar,
W.E.B.
Du Bois--same year,
1912--in the Crisis
magazine, the journal of NAACP,
to conclude,
as he put it,
"This country has had its
appetite for facts on the Civil
War and the Negro problem
spoiled by sweets."
They'd eaten too much candy.
Let me give you one other
example, from one of these other
Blue-Grey Reunions.
By the 1890s--these weren't
easy to do, these Blue-Grey
Reunions, bringing back
Confederate and Union veterans
to old battlefields or sites and
cities and so forth,
these weren't easy to do.
They first attempted doing it
in the 1870s.
Confederates didn't want to
come to these things.
1880s even it wasn't easy to do.
They had one at Gettysburg on
the twentieth anniversary and on
the twenty-fifth anniversary,
but it was hard especially to
get Confederates to go to
Gettysburg, the scene of their
worst defeat.
But by the 1890s,
twenty-five years out now,
and thirty years out,
from the war,
with the transmission--and we
know this about so many events
and the way generations learned
from one another and the way
memory gets passed on--as soon
as there is truly a generational
transition,
the old veterans,
as they get older,
are willing to come.
The 1900 Blue-Grey Reunion was
held in Atlanta.
And by the way,
Southern cities started to
compete for these things just
like Northern cites,
because they were huge
moneymakers.
Thousands and thousands of
veterans would come with their
families and spend thousands and
thousands of dollars.
Anyway, in 1900 the Blue-Grey
was in Atlanta,
and during the major speeches
at that reunion the Commander of
the GAR,
the Grand Army of the Republic,
the big Northern veterans'
organization,
was a guy named Shaw from
Massachusetts;
no relation to Robert Gould
Shaw of the famous 54^(th) Mass.
And in his speech he lectured
the Confederate veterans--this
guy had a lot of New England
chutzpah--he lectured them about
their efforts to control school
textbooks;
which by the way all veterans'
organizations were absolutely
doing.
Every Confederate veterans'
organization had its textbook
committee, and many Union
veterans' posts and
organizations had their textbook
committee.
They were competing with one
another to control the story in
America's textbooks and trying
to lobby and control publishers.
Anyway, Commander Shaw was a
little exercised about this,
and he said,
among other things,
quote--and you can almost see a
sort of schoolmarmish
finger-wagging in what he says.
He said, quote,
"Keeping alive sectional
teachings as to the justice and
rights of the cause of the
South,
in the hearts of your children,
is all out of order.
It is unwise and unjust."
Uh huh.
The Commander of the United
Confederate Veterans was none
other than John B.
Gordon.
John B.
Gordon had been a Confederate
General.
John B.
Gordon was the Confederate
General in charge of the
stacking of the arms and the
surrender at Appomattox.
John B.
Gordon then went on to get
elected Governor and then
Senator from Georgia during
Reconstruction.
He was also one of the founders
of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia,
although he lied through his
teeth in the KKK Hearings of
1871 about it.
But John B.
Gordon, by the 1890s,
became one of the most
ubiquitous and popular
Confederate Memorial Day
speakers.
And he was good at it.
He got up to respond to
Commander Shaw--and this is a
final passage in what he said.
John B.
Gordon, 1900,
head of the UCV,
United Confederate Veterans.
"When he tells me and my
Southern comrades that teaching
our children that the cause for
which we fought and our comrades
died is all wrong,
I must earnestly protest.
In the name of the future
manhood of the South I protest.
What are we to teach them?
If we cannot teach them that
their fathers were right,
it follows that these Southern
children must be taught that
they were wrong.
I never will be ready to have
my children taught that I was
ever wrong, or that the cause of
my people was unjust and unholy.
Oh my friends,
you were right,
but we were right too."
Everybody was right,
nobody was wrong,
in a war that killed 620,000
people and maimed about 1.2
million, and transformed the
society.
But no one was wrong.
In fact, by the 1890s,
as it is still today,
it became very popular to be a
Confederate veteran.
If you've read Tony Horwitz's
Confederates in the
Attic, he showed how so many
Civil War re-enactors,
it appears still today,
prefer to re-enact Confederates
than to re-enact Unionist,
although there are lots of
Union re-enactors;
and there are now lots of black
re-enactors.
Which raises a fascinating
intellectual question,
which we don't have to dwell on
now,
and that is why is defeat
sometimes more interesting than
victory?
Ask yourselves that.
Why do those Nazis never
disappear from the bookstore
shelves, often right up front?
Nazis, dogs,
and the Civil War,
as the publishers sometimes
tell you, if you write about
those we'll buy it,
we'll sell it.
Hate being in that category.
And then there are those who
will say things like Nazis'
Holocaust memoirs,
dogs, and the Civil War--horses
too, big deal,
the horses.
Anyway, the Confederate
Veteran magazine,
which became a very popular
magazine in the 1890s and lasted
like thirty-five years into the
twentieth century,
ran this little story in 1894.
It reported a story of a
Southern woman,
a white woman,
and her son,
attending a production,
a theater production in
Brooklyn, New York,
of the play called Held by
the Enemy.
And theater productions,
plays, about the Civil War,
especially with some kind of
reconciliationist theme,
became wildly popular by the
1890s.
The boy, sitting there with his
mother, according to the
anonymous author,
asked his mother,
"What did the Yankees fight
for, Mother?"
And as the orchestra strikes up
"Marching Through Georgia," the
woman answers,
"For the Union,
darling."
Painful memories,
we're told, bring sadness to
the mother's face as she hears
the Yankee victory song.
And then earnestly the boy
asks, "What did the Confederates
fight for, Mother?"
And before the mother can
answer, the music changes to
"Home Sweet Home," which fills
the theater,
says the author,
with its depth of untold melody
and pathos.
The mother whispers her answer
to her son.
"Do you hear what they are
playing?
That is what Confederates
fought for darling."
And the boy counters,
"Did they fight for their
homes?"
And with the parent's
assurance, the boy bursts into
tears, and with what the author
calls "the intuition of right,"
he hugs his mother and
announces, "Oh Mother,
I will be a Confederate."
They just fought for their
homes, that's all you needed to
know.
Now it may be all a mother
would want her little boy to
know.
But all over American culture
there were millions who didn't
really want to know any more.
Everybody was right,
nobody was wrong.
There are a hundred ways to
plant this story,
or examples through which to
tell this story,
and I don't want to take really
any more time on it.
You can read a book called
Race and Reunion,
if it ever so moves you.
I want to get to our review;
yes I am getting to our review.
But I do want to leave you with
this thought;
two images, if I can;
three images actually.
Or two metaphors;
one I guess isn't quite a
metaphor.
In the second chapter of Du
Bois' The Souls of Black
Folk--okay,
I'm going to test you,
how many of you have read
The Souls of Black Folk?
Oh, we got work to do at Yale.
No one should have a degree
from Yale without reading The
Souls of Black Folk.
No one should have U.S.
citizenship without reading
The Souls of Black Folk.
But since I don't rule the
world, who cares?
Chapter 2 of Du Bois'
masterpiece is an essay he
called "The Dawn of Freedom."
It starts out ostensibly as an
essay on, kind of a little
history of The Freedmen's Bureau
and a little take on
Reconstruction,
but he turns it into much, more.
He turns it into a
meditation--not unlike Penn
Warren will do in 1961--but a
mediation on the meaning and
memory of slavery,
the Civil War and
Reconstruction.
And he goes into a discussion,
as only Du Bois could,
because Du Bois was really a
poet-historian or a historian as
poet.
He begins to discuss how bleak
life actually is on the ground,
in the South,
not just for the freedmen as
sharecroppers,
but for whites as well;
that poverty is a black and
white thing, he says.
He's got another chapter to
come in the book called "The
Black Belt," where he shows
that, that poverty is something
Southerners share,
if they would.
And then he stops and he says,
in effect, see this picture
with me through what he calls
two figures.
He says they're two figures,
in his view,
that typify the post-war era
and the power of its legacy.
Here's the passage.
"Two figures," says Du Bois,
quote, "the one a grey-haired
gentleman whose fathers had quit
themselves like men,
whose sons lay in nameless
graves, who bowed to the evil of
slavery because its abolition
threatened untold ill to all;
who stood at last,
in the evening of life,
a ruined form,
with hate in his eyes."
Your first figure is an old
white man, probably a former
planter, who's lost everything.
He's bitter, he's really bitter.
He feels a burden of Southern
history.
And then Du Bois says,
"And the other,
a form hovering dark and
mother-like,
her awful face black with the
mists of centuries,
had aforetime quailed at that
white master's command,
had bent in love over the
cradles of his sons and
daughters, and closed in death
the sunken eyes of his wife;
and ay too, at his behest,
had laid herself low to his
lust and borne a tawny man child
to the world,
only to see her dark boy's
limbs scattered to the winds by
midnight marauders riding after
'Damned Niggers.'"
The second image,
an old black woman,
former slave,
mammy, but also broken,
no future,
doesn't even know where that
son might be,
and the son is probably dead.
But Du Bois presses the issue.
Du Bois had a genuine sense of
tragedy and he didn't care
sometimes whether he gave you a
happy ending.
He pressed the issue.
He says then,
"These were the saddest
sights"--I'm quoting--"of that
woeful day,
and no man clasped the hands of
these passing figures of the
present-past"--legacy,
where past and present meet.
"No man clasped the hands of
these passing figures of the
present-past;
but hating they went to their
long home, and hating their
children's children live today."
Now, unmistakably,
Du Bois is using that language
of clasping hands for a purpose,
because it's by far the most
ubiquitous image used in all the
Blue-Grey Reunions,
by the '90s.
He first wrote this essay in
1897 and revised the Souls of
Black Folk in 1903.
But the most ubiquitous image
in all the Blue-Grey reunions
was--in fact the slogan
was--clasping hands across the
bloody chasm.
And the shaking of hands,
of the Blue and the Grey,
the old Confederate vets,
the old Union vets,
was always the photo op;
and it's all over the ending of
Burns' film.
And how can you resist it?
In some ways,
what can be more beautiful than
old, old men,
chests full of medals,
shaking hands across the walls
they tried to kill each other
over?
There's something human about
that, that we can't quite
resist.
But Du Bois says, you know what?
There are two other kinds of
veterans of the Civil War,
and no one's ever clasped their
hand.
And now I will just ask you to
think--I'm not doing this for
any political partisan reason--I
don't know if you've read it but
at the very end of Barack
Obama's race speech.
I'm talking about Obama now as
a historian, not as a candidate.
He's got enough problems
with...
[Laughter]
Reverend Wright right now.
But this is Obama the writer.
And I don't know if he read
Chapter 2 of Souls before
he wrote that speech,
in Philadelphia a month ago;
it doesn't really matter if he
did.
And I don't remember,
if you read to the end of it,
if you've read it,
or if you heard it--I've
actually never heard it,
I've only read it.
But the way he ends that speech
is the way a lot of politicians
get up on the stump and talk.
And at first you're ready to
dismiss it, it's another one of
those stories of "well,
you know, I met somebody on the
campaign trail and here's what
she said to me,
and she had this terrible story
to tell;
let me tell you her terrible
story."
And you start tuning out like
"oh God, here comes another
story of Old Aunt
Something-or-other on welfare or
whatever."
But no, it's the story of a
young twenty-three year old
white woman named Ashley Baia,
who is his campaign manager in
Florence, South Carolina.
And he remembered the story of
when he, during the South
Carolina primary,
he was doing an event in
Florence,
South Carolina,
and he meets Ashley and Ashley
tells him her story.
And that story is,
in brief, that she grew up with
a single mother,
poor, a poor white girl in the
South.
At age about ten her mother got
cancer, lost her job.
The family went bankrupt,
etcetera, etcetera.
In order to help out her
mother--she told the story of
eating nothing but mustard and
relish sandwiches for a year or
a year and half.
Apparently her mother survived
but they never really--survived
with a bankruptcy.
But somehow as she got older
she got interested in politics.
Now that's a white,
lower working-class,
poor, southern girl who had
every right to be in that group
Obama had described earlier,
who are the whites in America
with a lot of resentment of all
the racial changes in America.
Instead she becomes his
campaign manager,
and she put together this whole
gathering in Florence,
in some, I don't know,
church hall or wherever they
were meeting;
mostly black folk.
And then Obama describes how
everybody in the room had to go
around and say why they were
there, or what issue they were
there for.
And he says,
with quite some directness,
that most people did what most
people do, they name a single
issue;
it's about them,
it's about us,
right?
It's not about the common good,
it's about us.
I want a better job,
I want healthcare,
I want this,
I want that,
I want, I want,
I want.
Okay, fair enough.
And they finally come around to
an old back man who's sitting
there, kind of at the end of the
aisle, and he's asked,
"So why are you here?"
Obama doesn't even name him.
He says, "I'm just here because
Ashley brought me here.
I'm only here because of
Ashley."
Now Obama says--in effect,
he develops at the end of the
speech a refrain about not this
time, he says;
not this time,
we're not going to let race
divide us this time.
Like Du Bois' two figures,
hating, till their death;
and hating, their children's
children live today.
Well, here are two children.
But note what he's reversed.
We got a young white woman who
should've been in the resentful
white working-class,
and an old black man who no
doubt grew up in Jim Crow and
probably has told story after
story of the denigration or
destruction of his dignity for
the first 45 years of his life.
But he's there because of
Ashley.
Thank you.
 
