This is an opinion column.
As I stood where Confederate General Robert E. Lee gave the order for Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, I wondered what lies he believed that led to that moment. As American blood drenched the fields, did he question why an ultimately overwhelming force of his own countrymen opposed his cause? More than a century and a half later, many of us wonder whether our American Republic can long endure. Gettysburg provides an answer.
More than 1328 monuments, memorials, and markers dot Gettysburg National Military Park. Soldiers who fought in the battle placed many of them. As a Southerner, the confederate memorials caught my attention. The earliest and largest depicts Lee atop his beloved horse, Traveler, as he faces the Union line. The inscription reads “Virginia to her sons at Gettysburg.” While the inscription is muted, the grandeur of the memorial certainly isn’t.
As American perspectives and values evolved, so did the Confederate memorials. Tennessee erected its monument in 1982, the year I was born. It would be difficult to distinguish the volunteer state’s memorial from other tombstones if it were placed in an old cemetery instead of a field. The inscription reads in relevant part, “They fought and died for their convictions, performing their duty as they understood it.”
Those are hardly resounding words of moral certainty.
The Union’s cause was holding a divided nation together, but what about the Confederacy?
Joseph Glatthaar, history professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, notes that only about 20% of households in seceding states owned slaves as of 1860. What would make the other 80% sacrifice their sons and daughters? No, it wasn’t states rights. Few people run headlong into a volley of musket fire to advance an esoteric government theory.
While the economics of slavery were the driving force, Confederates zealously believed a grand lie that moved them to kill and be killed in the bloodiest war in American history.
As the abolitionist movement gained momentum in the United States, Southerners realized so much of their way of life was at stake. Rather than undertaking wholesale economic and social change, Southerners gradually deluded themselves by fabricating a moral mandate for the fight.
“You go to contribute to the salvation of your country from such a curse,” Methodist minister R. N. Sledd told battle-bound Confederate soldiers. “You go to aid in the glorious enterprise of rearing in our sunny south a temple to constitutional liberty and Bible Christianity. You go to fight for your people and for the cities of your God.”
Another prominent South Carolina Presbyterian theologian, James Henley Thornwell, framed the war as a much more consequential fight. “The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders. They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.”
With few exceptions, similar messages echoed from pulpit to pulpit across the 19th Century South.
After the Civil War, the Union had accomplished its objective. Yet the South struggled to let go of the “holy’' war it had spawned. The delusions of righteous grandeur explain why “Lost Cause” mythology and romanticized notions of the Antebellum South live on. They’re far less painful than tracing our lineage to those who were either deceived into or directly waged an unnecessary war to maintain an atrocious institution.
I love the South with all my heart, but we must not gloss over her sins. My children are the first generation in my family taught about the Civil War without the rosy haze of Southern pride.
As my boys stood between cannons on Gettysburg’s battle lines, Confederate and Union blood flowed through their veins. While the Civil War’s battles are history to them, new voices beg them to make villains of their countrymen. They warn of shadowy enemies who will lie, cheat, and steal to take the America my sons deserve.
They must listen to a quieter voice.
Carried by the wind, the fallen at Gettysburg provide an answer to maintaining our republic. They beg us to know the truth, pursue justice, and reject the folly of popular lies. If we the people fail in those efforts, Gettysburg’s hardened memorials warn of the bloody price we will pay.
Smith is a recovering political attorney with four boys, two dogs, and an extremely patient wife. He engages media, business, and policy through the Triptych Foundation and Triptych Media. Please direct outrage or agreement to firstname.lastname@example.org or @DCameronSmith on Twitter.