South’s Civil War hounds refuse to heel

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

BY STEVE JANOSKI

She was a middle aged woman, blonde as I recall, who wore too much makeup as if trying to hide her true age. She stood behind a desk at the Visitor's Center at whichever battlefield I, a 10 year old kid, had found on a map while on a trip through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

"Who won this battle?" I asked her.

"Oh, we did," she said with a beautiful southern drawl.

Not, "The South won," and not "The Confederates won."


No, it was, "We won"— we the South, as opposed to "YOU," the North — that's what she said. I never forgot the innocence with which she said it, or the devious meaning that lies beneath those two words.

There's no denying that there's something special about the Civil War that draws the American public to it.

I've been reading voraciously about this war since I was little and I'm not the only one; the Civil War section is undoubtedly one of the largest in the bookstore, especially impressive considering that the war lasted only four years.

Whether it was the "brother against brother" dynamic or that it was one of the few wars fought underneath our feet as opposed to on some faraway European plain, we are continually enamored with the story of this great, noble catastrophe that freed the enslaved and solidified the strength of what would become the world's only superpower.

Last week was the 150th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and the Civil War fever has become white hot as the media turns its attention again toward that piece of the past.

Countless articles have been printed looking back at the war's legacy, and all of them have taken their own slant on what happened and why; what they say varies greatly depending on where the writer is from.

TIME magazine's April 18 issue had Abraham Lincoln's tear-streaked face emblazoned on its cover along with the caption, "Why we're still fighting the Civil War"— six days before it was published, Confederate re-enactors shot off shell-less mortar rounds towards Fort Sumter to commemorate the first shots.

It is an odd thing. In most countries, the people don't want to even remember the wars they fought — in America, we dress up like the soldiers and fight them again, but this time "for fun."

Not that the spectacles aren't fascinating, because they are, but the question of why so many feel that this old war is so intensely relevant remains.

On his show "Real Time," Bill Maher undoubtedly spoke for many a northerner when he said that nobody in California ever thinks about the Civil War. I think that's likewise for many people in New Jersey or New York or Massachusetts.

But go down to Virginia, boy…and it's "We won this battle."

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group for men who can trace a direct line back to a rebel vet, has 30,000 members. The Sons of Union Veterans? Just 6,000, even though twice the number of Northerners served.

Confederate colors still fly from trucks and flagpoles, and some southerners still argue that it wasn't slavery that started the war at all, but "state's rights" (the people who believe this are either willfully ignorant or outright stupid.)

The more backward of this bunch might even call it the War of Northern Aggression — even though the South fired the first shots; no other piece of American history has been revised and re-revised so extensively in a vain attempt to soften the blow of knowing that half the country fought to preserve slavery.



But many of these people forget that it matters little, because no matter what the "legacy," the Old South is as dead as the men who fought for it.

Texas has a burgeoning Hispanic population, while parts of Florida have become "Little Havanas" because of the Cuban refugees who have made their homes there.

Northern Virginia is becoming one large block of suburban condo associations, the battlefields of Tennessee are being paved over, and all the while the elderly are moving south to avoid snow and taxes.

The wheels of progress are grinding away our bloody past, as they always have, and those whose identity is defined by their white-knuckle grip on that past have already been left behind.

There are some silent reminders of our old division — the electoral map of 2000, for instance, was nearly identical to the secession map of 1861, and racial tensions still grow fierce on occasion — but never close to the previous tribulations.

Commemorating the Civil War is important, but it must always be remembered that it is unequivocally over.

The start of the war should not be "celebrated," because celebrating this war would be no different than celebrating the slaughter at Verdun or the firebombing of Dresden.

It must be remembered, marked, and looked upon solemnly as exactly what it is: a terrible tragedy that very nearly destroyed the world's greatest nation.

And in the end we must, as writer Allan Gurganus said, fold up those battle flags and put them behind glass — and they should never be unfurled again.

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