On this date, April 9th, 161 years ago, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. It would take some time for word to spread south of the surrender and end all the armed conflict.
It is only in the last few years historians have come to some agreement about the causes of the war and even the name of the war. In the North it was always the Civil War. But in the South it was the War Between the States. Or the War of Northern Aggression. Or the War for Southern Independence.
Southern historians for over a century denied the war was for the preservation of slavery and insisted it was about states’ rights. Of course that is right, but they failed to specify that the state’s right they wanted to protect was the right to hold human beings as slaves. In the North the war was not so much about slavery as it was the preservation of the Union. It would be nearly two years into the conflict began before President Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation declaring black Americans free.
Why talk about the Civil War on this anniversary of Lee’s surrender? I think we need to as I believe there are lessons we should acknowledge we
don’t often think about. Mostly we think of the war as simply a war to end slavery, but there is more to learn.
One is that the war not only released Black Americans from slavery, it made clear Black Americans have equal citizenship with White Americans. There are no classes of citizenship in America.
The war made clear that the compact entered into by the states when they adopted the constitution was one that could not be dissolved. Until the war there was the question of whether a state had a right to withdraw from the nation created by the constitution. At the time of the war most people, at least in the South, considered their state to be their country. I asked my granddaddy why his daddy joined the Confederate Army when Trawicks were just one mule dirt farmers owning no slaves. His quick answer was: “Son, when your country is attacked you have no choice but to fight.” Alabama was his country.
Another lesson. When you have clearly lost, it is time to stop fighting and look to the future. There were southern leaders who urged Lee to not surrender but break his army into small guerilla forces and send them throughout the south. He refused and instead urged his soldiers to return home and start rebuilding their lives.
Another is the prewar South elevated to leadership men whose main aim was the preservation of an immoral slave economy. Who your leaders are matters. Elect immoral leaders and you get an immoral government. The racial problems our country has experienced and is experiencing are a good example of the biblical admonition that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation.
Another lesson is that often those on the losing side are the best ones to start the healing process. There is a story about General Lee being in a worship service at St. Paul’s church in Richmond in June 1865. A black man attended the service and went to the rail to take communion. The white congregants would not go to the rail. General Lee went and knelt beside the black man to receive the bread and wine. Then the other white congregants came forward. We should never let our hatred keep us from doing what is right.
The Civil War is over, but many of the issues surrounding the war remain alive. I am a proud son of the south. We lost and I am glad we did. It is way past time we moved on.
Gary Trawick is a retired Superior Court Judge, writer and teller of stories. He and his wife, Jennings, live in Burgaw.
WHQR commentaries don’t necessarily reflect the views of WHQR Public Media, its editorial staff, or its members.