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The Civil War was the most transformative event in America’s history; and it is one
that people still remember today. Indeed, we debate it with such zeal that we confirm
Faulkner’s maxim: “the past is not dead; it’s not even past.”
“The United States is now commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, and
in an important sense, we are still fighting it. We are fighting over the war’s causes.
We are fighting over the role that African Americans played in it. Indeed, we continue
to fight over such basic questions as when the war began, when it ended, and which side
was victorious.”
When Abraham Lincoln delivered his inaugural address, he acknowledged that a single issue
was dividing the country. a last-ditch effort to win back the South. ‘One section of our
country believes slavery is RIGHT, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it
is WRONG, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.’
“It was not a controversial statement at the time,” as David Von Drehle reminds us.
Indeed, Southern leaders were saying similar things during those fateful days. So how is
it that 150 years later, Americans have lost that clarity about the cause of the Civil
War?
In April 2011, on the eve of the Fort Sumter anniversary, a majority of Americans believed,
that this confederacy was motivated, not by a commitment to slavery, but by a commitment
to states rights.
Most students believe that the war began with Fort Sumter and ended at Appomattox with a
Union victory. But if the war was fought over the status of blacks, as Lincoln, Jefferson
Davis, and almost everyone else at the time believed, then the war began much earlier
than Fort Sumter and lasted much longer than Appomattox: it began with guerrilla warfare
between masters and slaves, and between Northerners and Southerners in several states, and in
the halls of Congress; it evolved into a military war after Fort Sumter; and it became a terrorist
war during and after Reconstruction.
Although the Confederacy surrendered, the Old South was destroyed, and the Constitution
was amended, Southerners nevertheless won the war by creating a new order of black “unfreedom.”
And they did so, in large part, by controlling how stories of how the Civil War got told.
Here we are in Memorial Hall.
A hall that commemorates Harvard’s students and graduates who served in the Union, though
not the Confederate, armies and navies during the Civil War.
Most Americans believe that Lincoln freed the slaves and that African Americans were
incidental to the conflict. This is because, for most of the 20th century, blacks have
been written out of the histories of the civil war. During the 50th anniversary of the battle
of Gettysburg, for instance, African Americans were not even allowed to participate. Our
course highlights the crucial role that African Americans played in the Civil War, before
and after.
Our course offers a new understanding of the conflict for the sesquicentennial and the
twenty-first century: a “long” Civil War that is still being fought.
We focus on primary sources, and explain how and why the histories of the Civil War differed
so dramatically from these sources.
We look at how Europeans understood the conflict, including poor factory workers in England,
who helped ensure that the Confederacy could not remain a separate country.
Throughout the course, we show how the war transformed literature, art, politics, history,
and memory.
And we reveal how these representations of the war shaped society, and the war itself.