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 “A Very Long Shadow”  11 “A Very Long Shadow” Race, Atrocity, and the American Civil War mark grimsley Following the battle of the Crater in July , Confederate artillerist William R. J. Pegram penned a well-satisfied letter to his younger sister Jennie. The Army of Northern Virginia,he wrote,had at last come face-to-face with a full division of African American troops.He had been hoping for such an encounter, believing it would prove good for morale. He was not disappointed . The Confederates had repelled their black attackers with a fury born of pure racial hatred.They had taken few prisoners.Instead,they killed as many blacks as possible—including many who attempted to surrender. Wounds received at the hands of blacks seemed only to provoke them.With evident relish,Pegram told of one Confederate infantryman who received a bayonet in the cheek.Rather than “throw down his musket & run to the rear, as men usually do when they are wounded,” the enraged infantryman had fought on until he had killed “the negro.” All in all, the encounter with the African American division had produced “a splendid effect on our men.”1 Episodes like these are not the sort that Americans like to recall when they consider their Civil War.Indeed,for decades they were almost part of a hidden history—not forgotten,exactly,but ignored because they did not fit the agreed-upon interpretation of the conflict. In the years following the Civil War,as David W.Blight has shown,three interpretations of the conflict collided : one version based on sectional reconciliation,another based on white supremacy, and a third, “emancipationist vision, embodied in . . . conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks tocitizenshipandConstitutionalequality.”2 Thethirdvision,however,proved unusable in a republic that remained dominated by white voices and white power.Itquicklybecamesubmergedbeneathaninterpretationofthewarthat emphasized the moral grandeur of the Union and Confederate whitecombatants . The essays in this collection represent what might be called the first generation of scholarship regarding Confederate atrocities against African American troops. That it comes only on the eve of the Civil War’s sesqui-  Mark Grimsley centennial should not be wholly surprising,for the subject directly and powerfully undermines the reconciliationist vision. It is, of course, impossible to find moral grandeur in the massacres at Olustee, Plymouth, Poison Spring, Fort Pillow, the Crater, and the other places discussed in this volume.Small wonder these events have been so long shrouded in obfuscation or drowned in silence. Small wonder that a common response to their discussion is resentment, for the reconciliationist vision remains strong. If white Americans have in recent years shown a willingness to celebrate the achievement of the , black soldiers who fought for the Union, that willingness has not generally extended to a dispassionate appraisal of the racism those same blacks confronted—from Northern and Southern whites alike—in the years before, during, and after the Civil War. One does not have to look far for an explanation.3 The issue of racism is not something remote in time and place. It is, on the contrary, part of the living present and therefore very much contested terrain.Emphasize racism in American history, and you make, however reluctantly, a very strong statement about the society that history has created. Emphasize racism in America’s wars, and if anything, you have done something even less palatable. White Americans are particularly reluctant to consider the racist underpinnings of their republic in the context of its wars, which are generally viewed as moments in which the nation’s highest values have been defended and exalted.Numerous military historians exhibit a similar reluctance that takes two main forms. The first admits a connection between racist attitudes and racially motivated atrocities but questions whether racism has animated official policy, strategy and tactics.4 The second tends to see the racist explanation for atrocities as superfluous, pointing instead to the inherent brutality of war, the cultural distance between antagonists, and tit-for-tat reciprocity.5 Such skepticism is not altogether misplaced,for questions of motivation are among the most difficult for historians to resolve.Nevertheless,the policy of the Confederate government and the conduct of Confederate soldiers toward African Americans were so blatantly racist that together they offer one of the best case studies of the interplay between racism and atrocity in the American experience. The articles in this collection have amply described both the policy and the conduct. Even so, it is fair to...

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