Will the Civil War ever really end?

Everything happening right now in the US, everything, has a piece of the Civil War in it. How could this be? Wasn’t it a long time ago? No. It was not. I am 53 this week and I knew a woman who grew up eating food paid for by her father’s Civil War pension. When an event is as big as the Civil War, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and freeing hundreds of thousands more, the chain reaction in history is enormous. If a butterfly can flap its wings and cause a typhoon, imagine what Gettysburg and the Address Mr. Lincoln gave there did.

On this date in 1865 General Stand Waitie of the Cherokee Nation gave up to Union forces ending most Confederate resistance. Lincoln had been dead for months and Lee long done, but Waitie had held out . . the last of the rebel generals to surrender was a native American. Think about this fact.

Think about the complexities of the relationship between First People and the United States. We need leaders who can at least grasp the fact that our heritage is complicated. 

The War was over in 1865 and reconstruction was beginning.

That is what I was taught in school, but now I know the war never really ended. Terrorist groups like the KKK fought liberty and the union. The solid South voted against the GOP and obstructed social progress for African-Americans for almost one hundred years. Grant broke the back of the Klan once, but by the 1920’s the Klan was back only to fade away again.

Now there is a new South . . . on the surface . . . though the stain of racism hasn’t vanished. My social media feed has exploded with neo-Confederates and racists making the old arguments and reviving the Lost Cause.

It was a bad cause, fought for bad reasons, and it needs to end.

Why should we have no tolerance for the Southern cause?

It was a cause based on support for race-based slavery. Race-based slavery was wicked. 

There was nothing, not the Bible, not the Church, that the slavers would not warp to defend their peculiar institution. The Bible, of course, could not possibly condone race based slavery because the concept of race was created after the Bible was written. It is true that the Bible at the time it was written did not call for the immediate abolition of economic slavery in Roman times. There were good reasons for this, but by 1861 those reasons no longer applied. Economic slavery (based on debt or conquest) was gone or nearly gone in Christendom when the South developed a new kind of slavery: one based on a twisted notion of race.

Just as God created male and female, He also created one human race. There was no justification in Christian doctrine for racism.

Global Christianity was (mostly) opposed to slavery. The South was a horrific exception to centuries of Christian progress. Washington and other leaders at the time of the Revolution knew this truth. They lacked the courage to deal with the problem as the British did: democratically and openly. Instead, they hoped time would kill the system that benefited them. . . .hopefully after they were dead.

Anyone who says that the Civil War would have happened without slavery is ill-informed. The “rights” that were being violated by the Union were the “right to property” and the property in question were souls created in the image of God.

There is nothing like racism in the history of the United States of America. It was condoned by our Constitution and practiced by many of our Founders. If the Civil War was a bloody end to slavery, the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery continues. Freed slaves were given almost no help and no restitution was made for centuries of unpaid labor.

President and Mrs. Obama must live (God help us!) in a house built by slaves.

Why say all of this? What should we do?

I am not wise enough to know all of what we should do, but remembering is important. Just as we should not forget the Holocaust, or the sacrifices that defeated Nazism and Communism, so we must not forget slavery. When we pretend the impact is over, we are fools. When we pretend we are sure of the solution (right or left), we are naive.

We are Americans. We have, all of us, inherited the Civil War and can only pray that we keep ending it. The Civil War was, is, and will be. God help me to stand with the side of Union. May we never tolerate those who play games with this deep, ugly passion for political gain on either the right or the left. Mostly, let’s remember General Waitie and how glad we must be he surrendered and then ask the harder questions about what he was doing and why.

God save this Republic.