RECONCILLIATION

 There was a period from roughly 1877 to the early 1910s that historians call the “reunion era” or sometimes “the Great Reconciliation.” Historians sometimes use “sectional reconciliation” or “the reunion of North and South.”

It carries no title nor official observance, but the effects remain.

Politicians pursued it to end the bitter feelings between the loyal states and the insurrectionist states of our Civil War. A stronger country emerged, so they argued, with this reconciliation.

It featured:

The public acknowledgement of both United States and Confederate state soldiers with joint memorials and reunions.

The naming of federal military bases after soldiers who had waged war against the United States for four long years. One of the most notorious was Fort Bragg, named after an insurrectionist officer generally viewed as a competent administrator but an ineffective field commander. He ordered the killing or maiming of thousands of Americans.

Personally, my family benefited as the government provided identical tombstones for two great-grandfathers, one a U.S. soldier and one a Confederate. They still stand in a lonely cemetery less the fifty feet apart.

The families of close friends didn’t fare as well. The reconciliation put the final nails into the coffin of Reconstruction and enabled the horrible effects of the Jim Crow era.

Last week we celebrated the surrender of the Confederacy. May we all hope for final victory.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 Today we continue to honor an event of 162 years ago, one which did much to save America from an insurrectionist invasion. On a hot July day, in a small crossroads town in Pennsylvania, some 13,000 men trudged up a one-mile ascent of open land with the intent of doing enough damage to our country to preserve the institution of slavery.

At the top of the rise, near a spot immortalized as “the copse of trees,” a bloodied American army waited, its center containing the Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac led by Major General John Gibbon and under the overall command of Major General George Gordon Meade. As mentioned in an earlier post, General Meade had commanded the army for six days, or the equivalent today of since last Saturday.

The assault involved three Confederate divisions Pickett's, Pettigrew's, (formerly Heth's division) and Trimble's (formerly Pender's division).

Up until, and including, this war, battles featured heroic charges by massed men against unreliable weaponry. Improvements to rifles and artillery would make such charges insanely horrible to imagine. Defensive warfare would become the strategy of choice until air power rained destruction far and wide and mobile tanks replaced horse-drawn warfare.

No, children, neither side had air power back then. The president was wrong.

Let us pause and imagine the carnage before us after the assault as the remnants of the insurrectionist army retreated down the hill back to their beloved general who, despite his masterful attempt at preserving slavery, would become one of, if not the, most revered, warriors for many Americans, even some so-called historians.

Because Pickett’s division consisted of mostly Virginian’s, and because Virginians contributed substantially to writing the immediate history of our Civil War, the assault, commanded by General John Longstreet, has come to us in history as “Pickett’s Charge,” a shameful moniker to the other divisions and a lesson to us that history is a complex affair which can’t be learned from watching “Gone With The Wind.”

Reconciliation: 18

Lyndon Johnson told the story of a Texas schoolteacher who, faced with a school board divided on whether the world was round or flat, concluded, “I can teach it both ways.” That’s how I feel about the current controversy about removing confederate statutes. That may not be surprising for someone who had great-grandfathers who fought on opposite sides or our Civil War.

On the one hand, I worry that, when we start removing history, we lose more than we gain. Remember how the Taliban blasted ancient monuments away as target practice? In the more distant past, after her death in 1457 BC, Hatshepsut's monuments were attacked, her statues dragged down and smashed, and her image and titles defaced, information lost—we regret—to future scholars for all times.

On the other hand, those who find themselves apoplectic over the removal of statues of Robert E. Lee should read a good history of the United States and its civil war. Consider then, that there are no statues of Benedict Arnold in the courthouse squares of America, and no controversy attached to their absence. Sadly, Robert E. Lee was as dedicated to, and capable of, destroying our country as it existed in his day as Arnold was in preventing its creation in his.

Both, as loathe as we may be to admit it, abandoned their oath to America in order to support her enemies.

I know that Lee is considered by many to be “an honorable man.” When I first gazed upon the mile of open fields that his troops were ordered into in the tragic three-division assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863, I  was no longer sure exactly how he merited that praise, but so be it. Let us simply try to understand those whose ancestors were owned by Lee’s wife and over whom he held total authority of life, punishment, or death. Let us further consider how, according to historian and author Elizabeth Brown Pryor, he referred to the family’s slave children as “my ebony-mites.” Is this an American badge of honor?

Were our ancestries different, so might be our feelings.

As a final thought, I primarily regret seeing another divisive movement settle upon our country like a primal, festering sore. Surely there is a need: poverty, the abandoned American Delta, collapsing infrastructure, and the need for decent healthcare for all, that could occupy our attention more productively.

Back to sending 15,000 men toward Cemetery Ridge for the purpose of preserving the institution of slavery, there have been moments when much of America wasn’t that great when we recall them. No matter how we may feel, couldn’t we, instead, recall the beaches of Normandy, and other times when she was?

Perhaps it's an institution
that isn't worthy of
monuments to its supporters.