Every year on Memorial Day I think about David Blight's 2001 book Race and Reunion. A former coworker / Civil War buff recommended it to me. Still gets less attention than it deserves. time.com/5836444/black-…
Memorial Day is always a staggering holiday. The death toll of our wars. The sacrifice. The youth of those we lost. The impossibility of repaying that debt.
We lay wreaths. We go to parades. We do our best to honor the sacrifice. But the irony of the sacrifice is that it's very success makes it hard for the rest of us, several steps removed from that risk to really comprehend it.
But as Blight points out the first celebration of the war was led by African American women in 1865, celebrating their husbands who fought and died so they could be free.
These were people who fully and completely understood that sacrifice. And in a pre-Reconstruction era had a vision of freedom precisely aligned with the nobility of our founding documents.
Within a year, Southern Cities began to coopt the tradition to honor their war dead, who had sacrificed their lives to defend slavery and inequality.
And then as Reconstruction came and rewrote recent history, the holiday was nationalized to honor all who fought. A war about slavery with clear right and wrong became an amorphous war for states rights with heroes on both sides.
Today we of course celebrate and remember those we lost in all wars and the Civil War is subsumed by more recent losses. That's a good thing.
But in whitewashing it's history, we've lost the chance to reflect on what is truly essential about our American identity. We're not perfect. We've made colossal mistakes. We've had deeply flawed Presidents. But we are a great people.
And when moments have called for sacrifice, those great people have risen up en masse in defense of our foundational ideas. Even when our leaders didn't. Even when victory wasn't certain.
Who better to represent that ethos than black slaves who fought and gave their lives so that their children - and their owners children! - could equally share in their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Anyway, take a moment to reflect and be grateful today for all of have sacrificed for us. And give Blight's book a read. /fin
