One hundred-and-fifty years ago on this day America was emerging from its long nightmare, a war between the states that we call the American Civil War. More Americans died in this four-plus year conflict than in all other military operations in our entire history put together. During this great ordeal brother killed brother and entire families were torn apart. Towns and cities were devastated across the South. Though slavery was formally and legally ended what followed was another one-hundred plus years of “virtual” (economic and social) slavery that created major problems we are still unable to solve as a free people. We have, if I read present events correctly, never fully recovered from this time. We are defined by race (itself an artificial and unscientific distinction) as much as any modern and free society in the world.
As a son-of-the-South I can tell you that the memory of this Civil War abided in my own family heritage as something that we understood as deeply life-changing. (I can still remember hearing the War referred to as: “The Way of Northern Aggression.” If you think about it calmly this is what it was to the people who defended the right of their states to self-government and the defense of slavery!) For my wife’s family the Civil War had little or no consequence since her parents were the children of immigrants from Bohemia. They didn’t even arrive in America until the beginning of the twentieth century. Like so many I met in the Midwest, when I moved here in 1969, she has a hard time understanding why Southerners remembered this War with such deep emotion.
Thus on April 14th one of the most stunning and impactful events in America’s history took place. Ironically it was Good Friday in 1865 when our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Booth, a rather well-known actor and rabid Confederate supporter, hated the president. Booth had developed previous schemes for killing the president but on this date 150 years ago he succeeded. America would never be the same because of what he did.
Growing up in the deep South I memorized the Gettysburg Address in grammar school. I also heard a great deal about President Lincoln. Most of what I heard was positive. (Times had changed by the 1950s, at least within the public education system in terms of how we learned about Lincoln.) But I also heard the quiet hostility against Lincoln. He is still hated by some Southerners and many of them are Christians. While I think I understand this bitter anger I reject it without qualification. I see Lincoln as the greatest president in American history hands down. I remain amazed at the contribution that he made to our modern life and liberty. He may not have been the savior of the African-American, as presented in so much myth, but he was a man of the people and for the people who loved the union. And Lincoln never hated the South. Had he lived we can only guess what might have been the fate of both the South and the African-American. Because he died on this day dreams of peace and liberty were destroyed on so many levels.
I noted above that I believe the nation has never fully recovered from this infamous day in history. I do not think I have made an overstatement. The present race crisis that we face is an elongation of our greatest national evil. We sanctioned nothing short of an “African-American Holocaust” through our system of chattel slavery. You might think this statement is overly dramatic yet most historians now believe our acceptance of slavery led to the death of between 10-15 million Africans. These men and women had been purchased and shipped to this land with the full force of law and Christian support. Modern attempts at reconstructing what likely happened have led me to this conclusion about the carnage and death that followed. (I have visited all of the major museums in America dealing with slavery and civil rights and the best, by-far, is in Memphis,Tennessee. This recently revamped museum is on the site where Martin Luther King, Jr. was slain on April 4, 1968.)
I majored in U. S. history in completing my B.A. degree. It astounds me that I never heard this subject taught, by Christians or anyone else, in a way that factored into our thinking the true consequence of centuries of slavery and its impact on us all. (African-American slavery has little in common with ancient slavery, especially that of the first century.) American slavery was, in my judgment, the most God-forsaken institution ever created by vile men. There is not a single reasonable way that you can make this institution look compassionate or humane. No way! I have read and heard the Southern arguments for Christians who loved their slaves and who practiced a compassionate system rooted in biblical thought. I have known ministers, and Southern-sympathizers of all, kinds, who try to defend this institution by quoting the Bible. This is unadulterated, devious bunk. I will not try, at least here, to prove this point. It is self-evident to readers who will read the accounts of the slaves and study the horrors with the evidence we now have at hand for all to see and read. Any study of the institution, and of how it was practiced, will lead a fair-minded reader to this same conclusion. Were their slave owners who loved their slaves? Of course there were. Did some Christians show love to their slaves? No doubt. But the system, the attitudes and the race conflicts that this all created trouble our society right down to this day. This Holocaust has drained us and now the results threaten to undo our civil society but we still live in denial as a people.
On this day, the day when Abraham Lincoln was killed, I wonder if we (especially we who confess that we are Christians) will make a point of reading more extensively about the great evil of slavery? Will we read the writings of the slaves themselves for a starting point? I wonder if we will consider Jim Crow again and the stress that this race-enforced evil inflicted on generations of our own brothers and sisters? And I wonder if we are willing to see how complicit and wrong the Christian Church was in this entire historical context? There is no excuse, and I mean no excuse, for the slavery this country embraced. And there is no good explanation for one hundred-plus years of Jim Crow laws. And there is still no excuse for the present society we have created that has advanced the almost complete breakdown of African-American culture and the family. I am not placing blame on you personally. I am asking that each one of us asks this question: “If there is any connection between today (2015), and that of April 14 in 1865, then what should we do to live the gospel and work for the restoration of the true ideal of liberty that promises equality and dignity before God and one another?” Is it too much to ask that white Christians begin a serious inquiry into the ills our nation brought upon us and our children over the course of nearly four hundred years of this collective history of how we dealt with African-Americans in our midst? Yes, black lives matter! It is time that we honestly face up to this as something more than a great slogan.
Related Posts
Comments
My Latest Book!
Use Promo code UNITY for 40% discount!
Thank you John !
As a non-American, I was exposed to the Civil War in 1966, back in the UK. There were trading cards that went on sale in 1965, and they were really popular in the UK, that were like baseball or hockey cards, that had all the major conflicts, battles, defeats, personalities, generals, presidents, quotes, photos, paintings, maps, and statistics to the ying yang. You got five to a pack with gum. I had hundreds of them. I was only 8 when I got them in 1966. But it started a long fascination and serious study of the Civil War, especially after I became an addicted history geek concerning the English Civil War and its consequences. The most compelling thing for me for the US Civil War was not only the institution of slavery, but how ingrained it was to both the social order and the economy of the US. To cease and desist from the slave trade meant a complete overhaul of the social order, economics, and a radical change in life and property and rights. I don’t think the north was ready for than anymore than the south. When you consider that 25% of slave OWNERS were black, and when you consider that black slaves fought side by side with their masters in the battles of the war, from Bull Run and others, much to the shock of the northern Yankees… it tells you how socially ingrained the whole slave system was. My own sadness at the legacy of the death of Lincoln has to do with Reconstruction. Lincoln had lofty ideas that his successors did not put into practice, that would have gone a long way to stop the rise of the KKK and the white victim mindset that set the south back for over 100 years. The victors of the war, the north and their politicians and business elites did not give on whit about the south and its development, socially or economically. The slaves were emancipated, but when the white south was being mistreated by the northern occupiers and their politicians, the ordinary folk turned on the black population. If we have learned anything, and I do not think we have, is that the USA still has not learned how to deal justly with winning military conflicts around the world. The only measurable success has been post WW2 Germany and Japan, where more than just the USA, but with the help of its Allies, were able to rebuild two societies from the ground up, socially, economically, and politically. The USA was not able to repeat that formula in Iraq or Afghanistan. The abysmal legacy of slavery has lasted too long, because the post Civil War administration screwed up on Reconstruction of the South. It all could have been so much better had Lincoln lived and none of his cronies that succeeded him would have had their chance to ruin and spoil the costly victory.
Here they are… those cards that started it all for me.
The face of the cards looked like this.
The reverse side always had historical facts to support the illustration on the front side.
On occasion, I still hear it referred to as “The War of Northern Aggression”. Listening to Roots in my car while driving to and from seminary wasn’t always the best idea. Sometimes I wondered what the other drivers thought of the woman sobbing in her car.
We have made very slow progress, one day of progress was on April 15, 1947 when Jackie Robinson played his first manor league game as a Brooklyn Dodger.
For the record, the question of African-American involvement in the confederate cause has been overstated. The responsible historians who have researched this find that participation to be much far less and of a markedly different nature then has popularly been affirmed… It was not until the extremities of the last few months of the war that the CS congress approved enlisting slaves to actually fight vs. doing forced labor building fortifications etc…
As a boy, I remember going to Springfield to see Lincoln’s home, the nearby museum, Lincoln’s tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery, and then camping out and spending a couple of days at New Salem. Closer to home, in Chicago, is the Illinois Historical Society, on the north side near Moody Bible Institute. I remember going there many times with my family and viewing in a large darkened room, the dioramas depicting the life of Lincoln. These experiences had a profound effect on me and have influenced me in subtle ways my entire life, and even now, I can find myself in tears, with a lump in my throat when I ponder it all. The inscription on the wall in Lincoln’s tomb – “Now he belongs to the ages” – is haunting. Have you ever visited those places, John?
Please allow me the liberty to add a final closing paragraph to your moving essay:
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” — Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865
Great words, John. Thank you.
The “elongation” of racism was the reason I left the church at age 17. Since my return at age 22 it has been my greatest source of sorrow (mixed with joy) and conflict as a pastor. I married a lady who shared my commitment to speak out against racism in the churches I have served. She has also shared my commitment that the issue was/is worth losing one’s job over. One good that has come from it is that our children and grandchildren—get it.
Barry Bruce liked this on Facebook.
Garry Trammell liked this on Facebook.
Susan Danaher liked this on Facebook.
Gregg William Quiggle liked this on Facebook.
Bill Alexy liked this on Facebook.
Clay Knick liked this on Facebook.
Ed Holm liked this on Facebook.
Sam Buick liked this on Facebook.