The Civil War Never Ended

Today marks the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox. We tend to use that date to mark the end of the Civil War, but in reality that wasn’t the end of the conflict. Assorted small battles were fought for weeks, even months after that date as various army units didn’t get, or didn’t want to get the memo. Then for a long period, the former Confederate states were conquered, occupied territory. Then, to use the always eloquent Richard Brookhiser’s stunningly apt phrase from this essay this morning, there followed a lengthy period of “neo-Confederate insurgency” spear-headed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, a period lasting many decades.

Finally, starting in the 1950s, a period of political and social progress, of which the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), were crucial milestones. But…somehow the fighting still isn’t over. Plenty of people DECLARE that it is over, and has been over for some time. But something remains unfinished. Changes in law have brought about some tangible results, but somehow certain American promises remain unrealized. There may or may not be legal barriers for all Americans to enjoy Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, but there continue to be social ones, with there being the practical outcome of procedural ones. This phase of the Civil War divides the country not along geographical lines, but cultural ones.

Anecdotes: I recall that the N word was used plentifully and generally in my working class New England home town in the 1970s. My Tennessee-bred father suffered no cultural alienation on that score. And the most recent occasion on which I heard it employed with malice IRL? Was by a New York City cop with reference to the visiting President of the United States. The other day, when one of the Republican presidential candidates announced that he was running, he used that tired, old coded language: “It’s time for us to take back our government”.

Take it back from whom, sir? Don’t tell me you don’t know what he meant, or that he didn’t mean that. He did. And it’s what his target audience wanted to hear, too.

Culturally, It’s not a North-South thing; it never was. Some people continue to want to protect ancient privileges in what amounts to a caste system and really can’t bear to be called out on it. It isn’t necessarily done with conscious hatred, although it often is. Most people can’t see their privilege, they take it for granted, don’t recognize it, and thus feel unfairly antagonized when it is brought to their attention. They’re like people on an ocean liner, becoming irritated by the screams of the people splashing around in the water down there.

It seems to me the American Civil War won’t be over until we think of ourselves as one human family, not a bunch of separate tribes. That’s not somebody else’s work to do. It’s yours.