In fanciful stories of Grant’s returning a ceremonial sword to Lee, or of the United States Army’s saluting its defeated foes at the laying-down-of-arms ceremony, white Americans fashioned a story of prodigal sons returning for a happy family portrait.
In
today's New York Times CUNY Professor Gregory Downs clarifies what did and did not happen when Mr. Lee surrendered to Mr. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse one hundred and fifty years ago this week, and why the mythology surrounding that meeting continues to haunt us.
Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace” and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army’s occupation of the South.
The first misconception Downs takes on is the popular notion that the Civil War suddenly ended with the signing of the surrender documents. What followed Appomattox was, in fact, anything but a surrender, as a de-fanged but still outraged Southern political infrastructure plotted ways to circumvent their military defeat. The most convenient targets of their outrage happened to be the people who they formerly owned--and fought the bloodiest war in the nation's history to keep owning--the newly emancipated Negro slaves. Little known and seldom recalled in today's Civil War re-enactment industry is the fact that following the "surrender" Grant had to lead federal troops into the South, occupying over 750 towns and enforcing the emancipation of blacks at gunpoint. Far from embracing the Federal troops in tearful reconciliation, Southern men and women reacted with a broad-based campaign of intimidation and murder that lasted for decades, well after the Federal troops were pulled out by 1870-71:
Meanwhile, Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. “It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace,” a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. “We are in the very vortex of war.”
As the public appetite for the costs of Reconstruction waned, the same Southerners who had started the war in the first place began to spin a mythology about the South and the roots of the Civil War that has persisted and metastasized to this day. Robert E. Lee was not a traitor but a noble gentleman defending his beloved state of Virginia. Stonewall Jackson was not a traitor but one of the wiliest of American generals. The Southern states that joined the Confederacy were not traitors but fighters in a noble albeit lost and misguided cause. These myths gradually grew into the now-familiar exhortations to "state's rights," and "less government" that infect every level of our local, state and national political system from the "Tea Party" to the Supreme Court.
Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white.
Without an understanding of what actually followed the end of formal hostilities of the Civil War, it is difficult to put other, more recent milestones of American history in context. Without understanding the perpetual undercurrent of racism passed on like the holiest of relics from generation to generation in the American South, without understanding the indignant rage that fuels it, events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the rise of the Civil Rights movement lose their context. The sheer bravery of sitting at a lunch counter diminishes in its impact without understanding that Jim Crow was the natural product of a simmering population that hadn't undergone any real transformation, least of all an actual reckoning. And the unprecedented rudeness, disrespect and calumny heaped by the heirs to this mythology in today's Republican Party onto the shoulders of the nation's first African-American President is the subject of another
Diary today, so I won't comment on it except to point out the fact of its telling juxtaposition with Downs' observations, and the fact that it appears in the same issue of the
Times.
So although progress has undoubtedly been made, most of that progress has been carved out by the Courts or imposed from outside. It did not emerge from the good will or reasoned deliberation by those who were defeated militarily. As a consequence there never really was a "Great Reconciliation," just a thinly cloaked continuation of what already existed. All of the legislation to roll back voting rights, all of the efforts to gut the social safety net for the poor, all of the abuse directed towards undocumented immigrants--have their roots in the same type of impotent rage that a baby displays when it has its rattle taken away. All of the vile rhetoric we now put up with from Internet chat rooms to the Halls of Congress owes its existence to the fact that Southern men were denied the right to whip and rape black men and women into submission as property.
The whitewashing of American's collective memory of the real, ongoing "history" of the Civil War has another, less obvious impact, according to Downs. It blinds us to the realization that wars never end neatly:
Beyond the problem of historical accuracy, separating the war and the military from Reconstruction contributes to an enduring American amnesia about the Army’s role in remaking postwar societies. Many of the nation’s wars have followed the trajectory established at Appomattox: Cheers at the end of fighting are replaced by bafflement at the enduring conflict as the military struggles to fill the defeated government’s role, even as the American public moves on.
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[T]he problem lies deep within Americans’ understanding of what wars are. We wish that wars, like sports, had carefully organized rules that would steer them to a satisfying end. But wars are often political efforts to remake international or domestic orders. They create problems of governance that battles alone cannot resolve.
While a fickle and distractable American public has largely "moved on" from Iraq and Afghanistan, two enormously wasteful, costly and, in the end, largely pointless conflicts, those nations continue their unabated descent into chaos. And as much of the same contingent of defeated Southern males that lost the Civil War now agitates for a new war with Iran, a war with no concrete, achievable goal, a war that would lead to widespread economic and political chaos on top of its sheer destructiveness, perhaps we will finally ask ourselves what value as a nation have we received in exchange for giving such deference and respect to the heirs of the Confederacy.