I’ve been an ardent follower of the NY Times Disunion blog almost since it started. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Times is reliving the Civil War in a sense, offering a day by day discussion of the war through the eyes of the people who lived it, offering access to not only the famous figures we learned of in history books, but also those whose stories haven’t gotten the same level of attention, like that of Pastor Dwight Witherspoon.
I’ve written about these in passing before, but I wanted to talk a little about today’s because it serves as a reminder of just what this war was fought over. An earlier Disunion piece reported on a poll which suggested that nearly half of Americans feel that states rights was the primary cause of the Civil War. This is an accurate statement as long as one points out that the primary right the southern states were fighting to protect was the right to own other human beings as property. And the primary documents of the period point this out–the South was not only determined to continue the practice of slavery, it wanted to expand it into the west, into the Caribbean and into Latin America. The CSA’s Constitution protected slavery explicitly, and its politicians defended the practice unapologetically.
And stories like Pastor Witherspoon’s show that this attitude permeated religious thought as well, and not without reason. The Southern churches had scripture on their side. I don’t say this to undermine the fact that the abolitionist movement was led by people of faith–I admire them, as a matter of fact, for their willingness to look beyond chapter and verse of their holy books and argue for the shared humanity of all. The truth is that the narratives that make up the Civil War are far more complex than most of us realize or appreciate.
