what to do with that Fort Sumpter shot
Today is the 150th anniversary of the first shots fired at Fort Sumpter. In other words, the start of the Civil War. I was mulling over writing about it when this NPR story looking to the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumpter that made my decision for me. It’s a thoughtful story that I encourage you all to take the time to read. The story encapsulated for me a lot of the struggle here in the South with how to handle our past. I’ve been at various places of dealing with that over the years but have yet to really know any answers. I suppose it’s the kind of situation that may not have any answers for a very long time. After all, when it comes to history in a place where bloodlines and family trees run deep and claim significant loyalty, 150 years isn’t that long.
The Civil War can be a difficult topic down here, and understandably so: the majority of people here have families who’ve lived here since long before the Civil War, they have multiple ancestors who fought for the Confederacy and/or suffered the atrocities of war at the hand of the Union. These ties and wounds run deep. Southerners have long cultural memories and will fiercely defend those memories when called upon to do so. This tends to create conflict and even misunderstanding about where they’re coming from. The most obvious conflicts tend to come in discussions over what the war was about. Ask the vast majority of Southerners about the cause of the war, and “States’ Rights” is the answer you’ll get in some form or other. Ask a Northerner, and “Slavery” is the consistent response. I myself spent some time as a staunch defender of the position that the Civil War was a war over states’ rights. When I was called upon to teach the Civil War in 6th grade history one year, I followed my usual habit and did some more research, rounded out my understanding, learned how to teach my students some ways of thinking about the war. The thing is, so much of this difference is entirely a choice of what date to view. Yes, the war was about states’ rights. Yes, the war was about slavery. As in many other things, the reason for the Civil War is not as black and white as we’d like it to be. The conclusion I’ve come to is this: for many Southerners, including those who voted for the initial secessions, it was about the right of states to self-determine wherever the Constitution have them the right to; but the fact still glaringly remains that the issue on which they forced the battle of self-determination was slavery. No matter which way you cut it, the South fought for states’ rights over slavery.
Now, given the economic structure of the time, it is possible to understand why slavery was such a volatile topic. For the big planters and their political representatives, the issues of money and budgets and the extra vote power of having slaves in your district outweighed the larger moral depravity of keeping other humans in captivity. And there were reasonable sounding justifications for all of it. I’m certainly historically-minded enough to see how convoluted and difficult the whole question of slavery may have seemed to the average Southerner at the time. Even so, that doesn’t excuse the fact that the larger moral issue should have immediately come to the forefront, and the difficult economic issues tackled in light of that. Secession was the easy way out on that front. Money and defensiveness was a more powerful motivator than the right and just way to treat humanity.
But here is where the difficulty for modern Southerners comes: what do we do with that? What does one do when, like Randy Burbage in the NPR story, you have dozens of ancestors who fought for the South and perhaps a great-great-grandmother or grand-aunt who was brutalized by Union soldiers, yet you realize the moral decrepitude of slavery? How do Southerners recognize the history of their families without glorifying the fight to retain slaves? What of all those who fought out of loyalty to their states, never having owned a slave? I still find those questions difficult. Sure, it’s easy for someone on the other side of the elephant in the room to just say, “Well, they were traitors who fought to keep people enslaved.” It’s a lot more difficult on this side to just write off an entire generation of men and the women who supported them. It’s a lot more difficult on this side to figure out how to deal with our own history.
I suppose in all of this I’ve come to realize that some of this struggle will remain with us until a few more generations have lived and died wondering how to feel about the Confederacy. Perhaps a better Reconstruction would have helped deal with these questions in a more forgiving manner. Perhaps another four years of Abraham Lincoln would have shown us how to hold noble parts of our history close and still reject the parts we know were wrong. I tend to reconcile it by believing that even noble people fight for ignoble causes because it seems right at the time; by understanding that rather than tackle the darkness they had been embracing to build their plantation empire, many people willfully deceived themselves; by knowing that sometimes rallying around a strong sounding cause (“States’ rights!”) is easier than facing who you have allowed yourself and your society to become; and by recognizing that for modern Southerners, glossing over the past is a way of coping with the knowledge that their ancestors were on the losing side of a physical war and a moral battle.
Whatever approach you take, or don’t take, to dealing with the Civil War in your narrative of American history, the fact remains that on this fateful day, it began. It began almost as a surprise, almost unwittingly, and it claimed so many lives, livelihoods, and family futures. Those years were dark, bloody, and brutal, but their darkness was ultimately a part of who we are as a nation today: one without the legal protection of slavery, one without the legal enforcement of segregation or racial oppression, one where we take steps forward to right the wrongs of the past every day, one where the discussions about race might be vigorous and even ridiculous but where they can actually happen. There are nations who walked a different path, a less bloody path, to the equality of humans. But that is not our nation. Our nation’s path was and still is a convoluted one to walk. I don’t have all the answers, but I know this: 150 years ago today we would never be the same. And that is worth a moment of remembrance.