February 21, 2007
A Modest Proposal III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST Just a few points, if I may. 1) The stars and bars was indeed the flag of treason. So, of course, was the battle flag, and so was the stars and stripes 80-odd years earlier. The only difference is that the American rebels of 1776 won their war, the Confederate rebels of 1861 lost theirs, and the winners get to decide what is treason. (Let me add that I am very glad the South did lose; there’s no enthusiasm here for The Lost Cause, even if many of my ancestors fought for it.) 2) As a matter of political tactics, I believe in moving the ball down the field rather than insisting on only touchdowns. I don’t like the battle flag flying proudly with all its racist baggage any more than Mr. Zeitz does. To have it gone and replaced with a flag that lacks that loathsome baggage strikes me as an advance down the field. It is an aspect of the Anglo-American genius for politics to make a virtue out of muddling through, to use half measures, and to not lose any sleep over intellectual inconsistency. Two half measures, after all, make a whole measure. 3) Further, it is no small part of the genius of the English-speaking peoples when it comes to politics that they have a remarkable ability to let bygones be bygone. After Charles II was restored in 1660, Parliament passed the marvelously named Act of Oblivion, essentially wiping out whatever treason against the crown had been committed. The only ones exempted were the “regicides” who had directly participated in the trial and execution of Charles I, and a few others. To be sure, Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was dug up so that he could be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but since he’d been dead more than two years, I doubt that he suffered much. (I believe his head is in the possession of one of the colleges at Cambridge; I wonder what on earth they do with it. Perhaps Mr. Zeitz can report.) Much the same was done after the American Civil War. It was a wise policy. 4) Mr. Zeitz writes, “In the years following Reconstruction, Northerners seemed oddly complicit in a vigorous cultural assault against common-sense memory. They joined Southerners in refashioning the war as an epic family feud in which Johnny Reb and Billy Yank each fought courageously and honorably, then buried the hatchet and became brothers again. A powerful combination—the passage of time, the disillusioning experience of Reconstruction, and hardening racial sensibilities in both regions—led many Northerners and Southerners to revel in shared military glory without dwelling too much on the causes of the conflict.” I don’t think it was odd at all. An important part of what makes it possible for bygones to be bygone, perhaps, is some willful editing of the collective memory. Just look at the result in this case. The United States today is by far the most heterogeneous nation on earth and yet it is the most politically cohesive, with no centrifugal forces in the body politic. We fought this titanic civil war and yet, within a generation, we were one nation indivisible. That is an astonishing political accomplishment. Would that have been the case if the North had continuously rubbed Southern noses in the dirt of their defeat and constantly reminded them of their prewar rhetoric? Far better to meet at bivouacs, talk over old times, swap stories, drink too much, and thus make it possible to face the future together as brothers, instead of endlessly nursing the grudges of the past, as Ireland has done for so long and at such cost. If that requires a little historical fudging, then so be it. As Lincoln prepared to leave City Point on April 8, 1865, after the surrender of Richmond, he asked the River Queen’s band to play “Dixie.” “That tune is now federal property,” he said, and it’s “good to show the rebels that, with us in power, they will be free to hear it again.”
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