Three Lessons Learned From The American Civil War

I've been listening to the complete lectures of a freely-available class from Yale called “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,” taught by acclaimed Professor David Blight. It's been a very powerful listen, especially as it happily coincided with Black History Month. I wish it were intentional.

I want to share three lessons I've taken away from listening to the lectures of this class. I'm not going to provide a ton of context about the lessons, so I hope this is a fast read. If you feel the impetus to go through the entire class, which I ever so strongly recommend, then these lessons will make far more sense to you. I also think about how and when I want to impart these lessons to my son, when he joins me very soon in meatspace, as he grows from infancy to adulthood. Without further ado...

Time Doesn't Always Heal All Wounds

You hear it said from time to time.

“It happened so long ago. Why can't they just move on?”

But when you hear Professor Blight describe in vivid detail the horrific emotional, mental, and physical trauma that slave families went through—daughter being ripped from mother to be sold, mother being raped by the slaveowner, father being whipped and beaten—not just once, mind you, but repeatedly throughout several generations, the trauma and the dysfunction don't die when the affected generations die. They carry on and on, into today.

Behold, the biblical concept of “generational sin”. It is here on full display. It's the trauma of actions borne within families, and on families. And we are still bearing that bitter, rotten, poisonous fruit through our economic, social, and political policies. All because the people in power benefited from it. Which leads me to...

Money. It's A Gas.

Let's get the facts straight. The Civil War was absolutely about the South's desire to protect slavery, and the North's desire to abolish it. Don't let anyone tell you it was about States' Rights. States' Rights, in fact, is just code for “leave me alone to do grave injustice.” Grave injustice, in this case, being slavery.

And why did the South want to protect slavery? Because it was good fucking money—a lot of it. The South's economy was utterly dependent upon the sale and capture of human beings for forced labor and servitude. This, while the North was developing a more modern, market-based, industrial economy. So, of course the Southern states were willing to secede from the U.S., because there was too much financial stake on the line, and the South had nothing to fall back on if there wasn't slave labor to process those cash crops.

And yet, revisionists and deluded Confederate loyalists like Jefferson Davis argued that their way of life enabled “uneducated, uncivilized, and brutish” peoples from Africa to become docile, civilized, and Christian.

For fuck's sake.

Money isn't the root of all evil. But it is certainly the root of some of humanity's greatest evils.

Gotta Rip The Root Out

One of the most infuriating things listening to the class is how the South was placated in the name of compromise, especially during Reconstruction. And when you hear of the Radical Abolitionists like Thaddeus Stevens, who demanded that the defeated South be treated like conquered peoples, and the Southern states stripped completely of their statehood and rendered territories, you might be inclined to think, “Yeah, that should've happened.” That's what I thought, at least. The white, Southern slavemasters should've been treated like prisoners of war, or Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, or James Hammond, treated like treasonous traitors subject even to death. Instead compromise, appeasement, or corruption led to the South's reprise in their disgusting racism, terrorism, and post-war insurgencies like the Ku Klux Klan. And here we are, still paying the price.

So I think about today: the insurrectionists who stormed the capitol, Donald Trump, and his allies within the White House and in Congress. And I think about the Republicans today who accuse the Democrats of not moving on for the sake of unity. And I read things like this:

And I think back to Reconstruction, when white Southern leaders, at minimum, should've been left to rot in prison, and instead were allowed to regain their power.

And my rage simmers.

Evil must be ripped out from the root, and obliterated.

Statues aren't enough.