Historian Eric Foner states: Slavery was intimately related to the major trends [and] developments that we associate with American history in the first half of the 19th century. For example, territorial expansion, the westward movement, the frontier. The country grew tremendously in this period until, by the 1840's, it reached the Pacific Ocean. Frederick Jackson Turner, the great historian of the late 19th century, said it was on the frontier that democracy was born, that American ideas of equality were born, individualism.
But the frontier also carried with it the expansion of slavery. The westward expansion of slavery was one of the most dynamic economic and social processes going on in this country. The westward expansion carried slavery down into the Southwest, into Mississippi, Alabama, crossing the Mississippi River into Louisiana. Finally, by the 1840's, it was pouring into Texas. So the expansion of slavery, which became the major political question of the 1850's, was not just a political issue. It was a fact of life that every American had experienced during this period.
Americans in the 19th century thought of or spoke of their country as in Jefferson phrase -- an "empire of liberty." And the history of the United States was conceived of as part of the progress of mankind and the spread of liberty throughout the world. And you can see this in graphic illustrations of the period -- of liberty leading people westward. And progress was the essence of the American story.
Now, in the South, southern slaveowners insisted that slavery was absolutely essential to that story of progress. Without slavery, you could not have civilization, they said. Slavery freed the upper class from the need to do manual labor, to worry about economic day-to-day realities, and therefore gave them the time and the intellectual ability to devote themselves to the arts and literature and mechanical advantages and inventions of all kinds. So that it was slavery itself which made the progress of civilization possible.
Now, northerners by this period wouldn't have put it exactly that way, because they lived in a non-slave area. But I think in the North, the connection of slavery and American growth was really sort of ignored. In other words, people would talk about the expansion of the "empire of liberty" and never quite mention that millions of people in this "empire of liberty" were slaves.
The PBS Series Africans in America states, Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his freedom in 1847. Ten years later, after a decade of appeals and court reversals, his case was finally brought before the United States Supreme Court. In what is perhaps the most infamous case in its history, the court decided that all people of African ancestry -- slaves as well as those who were free -- could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott, needless to say, remained a slave.
Born around 1800, Scott migrated westward with his master, Peter Blow. They travelled from Scott's home state of Virginia to Alabama and then, in 1830, to St. Louis, Missouri. Two years later Peter Blow died; Scott was subsequently bought by army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, who later took Scott to the free state of Illinois. In the spring of 1836, after a stay of two and a half years, Emerson moved to a fort in the Wisconsin Territory, taking Scott along. While there, Scott met and married Harriet Robinson, a slave owned by a local justice of the peace. Ownership of Harriet was transferred to Emerson.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney: " . . . We think they [people of African ancestry] are . . . not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. . . ."
Scott's extended stay in Illinois, a free state, gave him the legal standing to make a claim for freedom, as did his extended stay in Wisconsin, where slavery was also prohibited. But Scott never made the claim while living in the free lands -- perhaps because he was unaware of his rights at the time, or perhaps because he was content with his master. After two years, the army transferred Emerson to the south: first to St Louis, then to Louisiana. A little over a year later, a recently-married Emerson summoned his slave couple. Instead of staying in the free territory of Wisconsin, or going to the free state of Illinois, the two travelled over a thousand miles, apparently unaccompanied, down the Mississippi River to meet their master. Only after Emerson's death in 1843, after Emerson's widow hired Scott out to an army captain, did Scott seek freedom for himself and his wife. First he offered to buy his freedom from Mrs. Emerson -- then living in St. Louis -- for $300. The offer was refused. Scott then sought freedom through the courts.
Scott went to trial in June of 1847, but lost on a technicality -- he couldn't prove that he and Harriet were owned by Emerson's widow. The following year the Missouri Supreme Court decided that case should be retried. In an 1850 retrial, the the St Louis circuit court ruled that Scott and his family were free. Two years later the Missouri Supreme Court stepped in again, reversing the decision of the lower court. Scott and his lawyers then brought his case to a federal court, the United States Circuit Court in Missouri. In 1854, the Circuit Court upheld the decision of the Missouri Supreme Court. There was now only one other place to go. Scott appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court.
The nine justices of the Supreme Court of 1856 certainly had biases regarding slavery. Seven had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South, and of these, five were from slave-holding families. Still, if the case had gone directly from the state supreme court to the federal supreme court, the federal court probably would have upheld the state's ruling, citing a previously established decision that gave states the authority to determine the status of its inhabitants. But, in his attempt to bring his case to the federal courts, Scott had claimed that he and the case's defendant (Mrs. Emerson's brother, John Sanford, who lived in New York) were citizens from different states. The main issues for the Supreme Court, therefore, were whether it had jurisdiction to try the case and whether Scott was indeed a citizen.
The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery -- wrote the "majority opinion" for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.
While the decision was well-received by slaveholders in the South, many northerners were outraged. The decision greatly influenced the nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the Republican Party and his subsequent election, which in turn led to the South's secession from the Union.
Peter Blow's sons, childhood friends of Scott, had helped pay Scott's legal fees through the years. After the Supreme Court's decision, the former master's sons purchased Scott and his wife and set them free.
Nearly a century and a half after it ended, the Civil War remains the central event in American history and an enduring source of public controversy. The past few years have witnessed disputes over the flying of the Confederate battle flag above the South Carolina Statehouse and the decision by the National Park Service to devote more attention to slavery at its battlefield sites. Clearly, the Civil War is not over.
RACE AND REUNION:The Civil War in American Memory.
By David W. Blight.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $29.95.
In ''Race and Reunion,'' David W. Blight demonstrates that as soon as the guns fell silent, debate over how to remember the Civil War began. In recent years, the study of historical memory has become something of a scholarly cottage industry. Rather than being straightforward and unproblematic, it is ''constructed,'' battled over and in many ways political. Moreover, forgetting some aspects of the past is as much a part of historical understanding as remembering others. Blight's study of how Americans remembered the Civil War in the 50 years after Appomattox exemplifies these themes. It is the most comprehensive and insightful study of the memory of the Civil War yet to appear.
Blight touches on a wide range of subjects, including how political battles over Reconstruction contributed to conflicting attitudes toward the war's legacy, the origins of Memorial Day and the rise of the ''reminiscence industry,'' through which published memoirs by former soldiers helped lay the groundwork for sectional reconciliation. He gives black Americans a voice they are often denied in works on memory, scouring the black press for accounts of Emancipation celebrations and articles about the war's meaning. As his title suggests, Blight, who teaches history and black studies at Amherst College, believes that how we think about the Civil War has everything to do with how we think about race and its history in American life.
Two understandings of how the Civil War should be remembered collided in post-bellum America. One was the ''emancipationist'' vision hinted at by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address when he spoke of the war as bringing a rebirth of the Republic in the name of freedom and equality. The other was a ''reconciliationist'' memory that emphasized what the two sides shared in common, particularly the valor of individual soldiers, and suppressed thoughts of the war's causes and the unfinished legacy of Emancipation. By the end of the 19th century, in a segregated society where blacks' subordination was taken for granted in the North and South, ''the forces of reconciliation'' had ''overwhelmed the emancipationist vision.'' Another way of putting it is that the Confederacy lost the war on the battlefield but won the war over memory.
The origins of the reconciliationist memory, Blight argues, can be traced to debates during Reconstruction, when Republicans made a commitment to legal and political equality for the former slaves, then abandoned it in the face of violent opposition from the white South and a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality. Horace Greeley's campaign for president in 1872 at the head of a coalition of Democrats and dissident Republicans focused on the need to ''clasp hands across the bloody chasm'' and return control of the South to its ''best men'' (that is, the former slaveholders). Despite his defeat, Greeley's campaign persuaded many Northerners to view their former enemies more sympathetically and to abandon the idea of federal intervention on behalf of the former slaves.
Meanwhile, Southerners were mobilizing in what the Virginia newspaper editor Edward A. Pollard called ''the war of ideas.'' During the 1870's, Southern publications like The Land We Love and works issued by the new Southern Historical Society promoted a memory of a war in which slavery played no part and blacks participated only as faithful servants who protected their masters' property. Old-time mammies and loyal slaves were celebrated in memoirs, tributes and statues. In this highly selective, not to say grossly misleading, memory, the legions of blacks who fled plantations to seek freedom behind Union lines and the 200,000 who fought for the Union were forgotten. Even today, of the thousands of Civil War monuments throughout the country only a handful contain an image of a black soldier.
By the 1880's, as mass-market magazines like The Century bombarded readers with veterans' reminiscences and the construction of Civil War monuments began in earnest, the nation's memory came to focus more and more on the soldiers' heroism, ''immunized,'' Blight writes, ''from motive.'' Ironies abound in the triumph of the reconciliationist outlook. Gettysburg, site of the greatest Northern victory, was transformed into a shrine to the Confederacy centered on Pickett's charge, the high tide of the Southern cause. Even Memorial Day, whose origin lay in 1865 when thousands of black South Carolinians placed flowers on the graves of Union soldiers, soon became an occasion for expressions of white nationalism and reconciliation.
Rather than the crisis of a nation divided by antagonistic labor systems and ideologies, the war became a tragic conflict that nonetheless accomplished the task of solidifying the nation. With Reconstruction having ended in 1877, another invented memory -- how the South had suffered under what was called Negro rule -- was widely accepted among Northern and Southern whites. The abandonment of the nation's commitment to equal rights for former slaves was the basis on which former white antagonists could unite in the romance of reunion.
Blacks were not the only ones forgotten in this story. Gen. James Longstreet, the Confederate commander who had the temerity to support the rights of former slaves after the war, was excised from the pantheon of Southern heroes. No monuments to Longstreet graced the Southern landscape; indeed, not until 1998 was a statue erected at Gettysburg, where he served under Robert E. Lee.
The reconciliationist vision of the war did not go unchallenged. On the margins of national memory, black communities celebrated the anniversary of Emancipation and the service of black troops. The unveiling in Boston in 1897 of Augustus Saint Gaudens's magnificent monument to the black soldiers of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiment for a time rekindled a more inclusive memory of the war. The most unusual dissenter discussed by Blight was the former cavalry officer Col. John Mosby, the ''Gray Ghost'' of the Confederacy. Mosby declined invitations to memorial events where speakers claimed that slavery had nothing to do with the conflict. ''The South was my country,'' Mosby wrote, and he was not ashamed that he had fought to defend it. But, he pointed out with refreshing candor, ''the South went to war on account of slavery.''
The Confederate John Singleton Mosby, aka "Gray Ghost" wrote in 1907, "The South went to war on account of Slavery," ... "South Carolina went to war—as she said in her Secession Proclamation—because slavery wd. not be secure under Lincoln. South Carolina ought to know what was the cause for her seceding
."
Blight begins and ends with the Gettysburg reunion in 1913, a ''festival of national reconciliation'' attended by more than 53,000 veterans, all of them white. Presiding over the occasion was Woodrow Wilson, the first elected president born in the South since Zachary Taylor. Wilson had recently dismissed many of the black employees of the federal government and imposed rigid segregation on the remainder. Three years later, he invited D. W. Griffith to show his film ''The Birth of a Nation,'' which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and presented white supremacy as the underpinning of national unity, at the White House. ''A segregated society,'' Blight comments, ''demanded a segregated historical memory.''
Blight tells this story in a lucid style and with an entirely appropriate measure of indignation. He does not explain why, if reconciliation triumphed so completely, Northern Republicans long reaped political windfalls by ''waving the bloody shirt'' -- reminding voters of the war -- during election campaigns. But the book is so persuasive over all that one regrets that Blight did not try to bring it up to the present.
Today, nearly all historians view slavery as the war's fundamental cause, Emancipation as central to its meaning and consequences, and Reconstruction as a praiseworthy effort to establish the principle of racial justice in the United States. As current controversies reveal, however, the reconciliationist vision of the war retains a powerful hold on many Americans' imaginations. Ken Burns concluded his documentary on the war with a loving depiction of the Gettysburg reunion as a moment of brotherly forgiveness, while failing to note that the betrayal of the dream of racial justice was essential to the process of white reconciliation. ''Race and Reunion'' demonstrates forcefully that in the year 2001, it still matters very much how we remember the Civil War.
Historian Eric Foner states: Slavery was intimately related to the major trends [and] developments that we associate with American history in the first half of the 19th century. For example, territorial expansion, the westward movement, the frontier. The country grew tremendously in this period until, by the 1840's, it reached the Pacific Ocean. Frederick Jackson Turner, the great historian of the late 19th century, said it was on the frontier that democracy was born, that American ideas of equality were born, individualism.
But the frontier also carried with it the expansion of slavery. The westward expansion of slavery was one of the most dynamic economic and social processes going on in this country. The westward expansion carried slavery down into the Southwest, into Mississippi, Alabama, crossing the Mississippi River into Louisiana. Finally, by the 1840's, it was pouring into Texas. So the expansion of slavery, which became the major political question of the 1850's, was not just a political issue. It was a fact of life that every American had experienced during this period.
Americans in the 19th century thought of or spoke of their country as in Jefferson phrase -- an "empire of liberty." And the history of the United States was conceived of as part of the progress of mankind and the spread of liberty throughout the world. And you can see this in graphic illustrations of the period -- of liberty leading people westward. And progress was the essence of the American story.
Now, northerners by this period wouldn't have put it exactly that way, because they lived in a non-slave area. But I think in the North, the connection of slavery and American growth was really sort of ignored. In other words, people would talk about the expansion of the "empire of liberty" and never quite mention that millions of people in this "empire of liberty" were slaves.
Nearly a century and a half after it ended, the Civil War remains the central event in American history and an enduring source of public controversy. The past few years have witnessed disputes over the flying of the Confederate battle flag above the South Carolina Statehouse and the decision by the National Park Service to devote more attention to slavery at its battlefield sites. Clearly, the Civil War is not over.
