Alternate Reality

It's always disorienting to read or hear the "argument" that the Civil War was about Southern "rights" and the desire of freedom-loving people to resist the oppression of an overbearing Federal government. But the weirdness reaches whole new levels when the "case" is put by a New Hampshire resident writing to the Valley News, the local paper that serves Lebanon and the surrounding region.

The desire to rewrite history, or inhabit an alternate reality, brings to mind Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that we're all entitled to our opinions, we're not entitled to our own facts. While I agreed with the late Senator from New York, I fear that far too many people don't. And that is very, very scary when one considers the implications for our national common life: If we can't agree on fundamental facts, how on earth are we supposed to discuss and debate issues? And if we can't do that, how are we supposed to address the many challenges that confront our society?

Comments

  1. MolloyDecember 13, 2010 at 5:36 PM

    As clear as day, I can recall being told by my fifth grade teach, Mrs. Burroughs (no relation to William S.) that "people will try and tell you that the Civil War was about slavery, but it wasn't. It was about State's Rights."

    If you get taught this at a young age, it is very difficult to shake. Especially, when it is combined with love of homeland and a nostalgia for a glorious past that never was. For example, I was well into my college years as a self-proclaimed Marxist Yippie (following the ideological path of Abbie Hoffman who died two years before I even entered college) and I was still spouting this "Lost Cause" swill.

    Of course, I had always been against slavery, yet I had simultaneously bought into the belief that the North had fought to retain the Southern states under the heel of the Federal Government rather than anything as noble as freeing the slaves. What makes this problematic is that this argument is TRUE ... up to a point. In a nutshell I believed that Emancipation was a happy accident, and the only good to come out of what was essentially a "rich man's war and poor man's fight."

    I won't bore you with my "conversion story"; however, I will share this. Every Southern apologist knows how Lincoln was a strong supporter of Colonialism--the plan to have black freedman emigrate to Africa. This is indeed a fact--from the early part of the war. What they will not tell you (perhaps because they are unaware) is that Lincoln's opinions on race changed greatly over the course of the war. They do not mention how in 1864, the President reached out to Frederick Douglass to enlist him in getting as many salves into the North as possible before the election (because he feared he would lose, and McClellan might reverse the Emancipation Proclamation). To return to your original point, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. The problem is that if those opinions are felt strongly enough they can dictate which facts we consider or half-consider, or ignore.

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  2. MolloyDecember 13, 2010 at 5:37 PM

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