[Note: I pasted the text into a word document for better readability; page numbers indicated refer to the page of my word document. My apologies for any inconvenience or confusion this may cause. I have included the speaker’s last name in an effort to increase clarity.]
The format of “Rally on the High Ground” lent itself beautifully to the task it sets out to achieve. A collection of speeches from a number of academic historians and a politician, almost in conversation with the National Park Service, gives the reader a number of different perspectives and makes clear the important, and incredibly tenuous, situation facing the organization: contextualizing the country’s Civil War battlefields, and why it matters today.
I was unaware of the legislation calling for this task and having the opportunity to read Congressman Jackson’s lecture explaining his intent clarified a number of structural elements of the present-day importance of public memory about the Civil War. Jackson introduces a theme he will touch on throughout his speech, which is the liberal-conservative-moderate paradigm that has influenced American public policy since the war (Jackson 17). For Jackson, we cannot say the end of the crisis of the Civil War has been realized until “every American is provided with economic security—employment, health care, education and housing” (15).
Jackson’s discussions on education, and his belief that it is a fundamental right, were particularly illuminating. He voiced something that, as a nation, we are seeing unfolding in many states right now: when education cuts are proposed, many turn to an “every man for himself” strategy. The budget proposed by Governor Perry for 2011-2012 calls for a 20 percent cut in education spending; families whose children will not be affected by this, or who are excelling intellectually, can easily turn a blind eye to those who will suffer most. Similarly, Jackson argues that the reason most presidents do not call for education as a fundamental right is that their experience has not been one “of being denied … an education” (16). He discusses the loophole-strategy conservatives across the South used to bypass the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954—private schools that couldn’t be touched by demands for integration. He offers race as a lens through which we can attempt to understand the legacy of the war (Jackson 14). Similarly, Ira Berlin notes that the issue of race today is directly linked to the issue of slavery in the past (Berlin 28).
Berlin also raises an interesting point that I found particularly salient while in Germany—the difference between guilt and accountability. He says, “We meet to prepare our children for the burden they must bear as the descendants of a slave society” (28). The question is not whether visiting a battlefield should make a southerner feel guilty and personally responsible for the suffering of slaves, but what knowledge is taken away from that battlefield visit and how does it inform that visitor’s worldview or manifest itself in that person’s goals and hopes for American society?
Berlin and David Blight both bring up an issue we have been discussing since reading Trouillot: language, and the control thereof. Whether it is the language we use today to discuss slavery (or “servitude” or “enslaved circumstance” (Berlin 28)) or the language that was used at the time to discuss the reasons the Union was (on paper) going to war and what “liberty” meant, written and spoken communication plays a large role in crafting perception of/and reality.
A huge, irreversible paradigm shift occurred as a result of the war—the transition to a powerful federal government imbued with the power to enforce rather than the prevention of enacting laws (McPherson 61). This is a paradigm, much like the liberal-moderate-conservative one described by Congressman Jackson, that still affects us today.
One aspect of McPherson’s argument I found particularly convincing was his inclusion of “cause” with “comrades” for reasons why soldiers fought (62). In our reading of Blight, we gained deep insights on the mutuality of sacrifice of both sides—a narrative that played a significant role in bringing about the reconciliation of the sections (to the detriment of racial reconciliation). The “for comrades” motivator played out not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front, giving civilians something to celebrate about the heroism of their men in uniform. But I think the crucial piece McPherson sheds well-researched light on is the “for cause” aspect. In diaries, letters and other means of highly literate communication, he discovers clear articulation of reasons soldiers were fighting: “…from simple but heartfelt vows of patriotism” to Constitutional issues like states’ rights, the definition of liberty, and slavery (McPherson 66). I chuckled to myself when James Horton retold John Singleton Mosby’s candid quip: “Don’t you think South Caroline ought to know why it went to war?” (Horton 81). The sentence immediately preceding that rhetorical device pins slavery as the reason the South went to war.
I also thought Horton’s discussions about the rationality of citing states’ rights as the chief catalyst were interesting. He notes that one reason South Carolina seceded was because the federal government was not enforcing federal law, the Fugitive Slave Law, against individual state laws, called personal liberty laws (Horton 78). This makes a cry for states’ rights from South Carolina seem much weaker. Additionally, he notes that in the nullification crisis of 1832, no other states followed South Carolina’s threats of secession over the issue of states’ rights, and yet in 1860, they did. Was it states’ rights three decades later, or fear of losing the institution of slavery?
The task of contextualizing something that will be seen and visited by numerous and various people is incredibly relevant for our goal as HIST 300 participants. It is not our job to make understanding the monument, the reasons it was erected, the politics of the time—all other aspects of explanation we hope to achieve—easier and more pleasant to stomach. It is not our job to be politically correct. It is, however, our job to be historically truthful and contextually honest. We, like the members of the NPS at the turn of the century, must provide information that will widen the scope of understanding and link the monument to the broader narrative running before the monument was conceived, during its planning and construction phases, through its tumultuous decades to the present, and into an uncertain future.