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174 } c h a p t e r s i x Survival’s Memory 1865-1965  The memory of war is a tricky thing. It inevitably changes as time marches on and those who actually participated in a conflict pass on. A new generation can never fully experience the fear, despondence, and loss, or the joy, victory, and nationalism of those who came before. Every nation desires to remember and promote the justice of its cause and the sacrifice of those who fought. Even defeat can morph into a living force, a consciousness that honors soldiers and commitment, and that expands on positive rationales for fighting. Such was certainly the case in the South. Belief in the so-called Lost Cause helped spawn an intense Southern nationalism following the Civil War. After a shattering defeat, with their lands devastated , a significant portion of their male population dead or maimed, and the system of slave labor eradicated, Southerners comforted themselves with the belief that their cause had been noble and heroic. They had fought to defend their land from tyrannous Northern invaders. They had fought to defend the true Constitution, untrammeled by Northern manipulation and federal power. The Southern mantra was, once again, states’ rights. When the Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stevens wrote books after the rebellion, their focus was on the sanctity of state sovereignty, not on a defense of slavery. The peculiar institution fell into the background of the conflict. Even today, arguments continue over the meaning of the rebel flag—whether it represents states’ rights or unadulterated racism.1 For the North, the meaning of the war had always, to some extent, been convoluted. At its core was the preservation of the Union. Republicans rallied behind this cause, but the Democratic Party split into war and peace wings—those for saving the Union, and those who believed secession was legal and that the South should not be coerced to stay in the United States. At the outset of the war, even Republicans insisted that it was not about Survival’s Memory, 1865–1965 { 175 abolition. Their thinking changed as the conflict continued. First they accepted emancipation as a military necessity, and then, by the midpoint of the war, they claimed that they had always been in favor of liberty for blacks. Thus, by the rebellion’s end, many in the North, and certainly in Connecticut, saw themselves as liberators of downtrodden slaves, and saw the war as a rebirth, a second revolution that finally realized Jefferson’s idealistic declaration that “all men are created equal.” To a large extent, modern Americans have internalized this history of the war, going a step further by supposing that it began to free the slaves. Except for a small minority of abolitionists, this simply was not the case.  Historians have delved deeply into the memory of the Civil War, some insisting that the South was not alone in perpetuating the myth of the Lost Cause.2 Some Northerners readily embraced the idea, partly because they desired reconciliation and partly because they were economically motivated to get the Southern agricultural system running again, and reconciliation aided that goal. After four years of conflict, of battles that astounded the entire nation by the extent of bloodshed and death, Northerners simply wanted peace, healing, and movement forward. It was the nobility of sacrifice and the devotion to the nation that captivated soldiers and citizens alike. As time moved on, there was no desire to wrestle with or agonize over the abolitionist sentiment that had developed as the war progressed. There was no clarion call to nurture the former slaves, the freedmen. As the historian David Blight succinctly put it: “Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas— healing and justice.”3 They chose healing. The racism of nineteenth-century America precluded the idea of justice . Or, perhaps more correctly, many in the North viewed emancipation as enough justice. Going any further could be equated with promoting black social and political equality, something that few white Northerners condoned. In this sense, there existed a distinct difference between emancipation and abolition similar to what had been articulated at the time of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. And though during the war, some Northerners may have developed a sort of amnesia regarding their prewar views of blacks, or even admitted the errors of those views, in the war’s long aftermath, there...

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