Readers and writers blog

This is a year for another presidential election, but I don’t think this one is going to settle the Civil War, either.

Oh, make no mistake, it’s still on.

I was reminded of this when I read a recent entry in the weblog Axis of Evel Knievel about South Carolina’s decision on Dec. 20, 1860, to secede from the union. The blog’s author, University of Alaska history professor David Noon, summarized the decision in blunt terms:

‘The state of South Carolina,’ Noon concluded, ‘chose to commit treason in defense of the principle of eternal black subjection.’

Now Noon’s entries generally focus on the dark side of history — hence, the blog’s odd name and its equally unusual subtitle, ‘Another day, another pointless atrocity’ — and generally draw a few comments. But this one drew 10 comments as readers went back and forth with the author about the South’s motives for secession and particularly about the word ‘treason.’

You’d think an event that supposedly ended 143 years ago would be settled by now. But obviously, it is not. Because that war wasn’t as much a military or a political event as it was a cultural clash. It was a culture war long before the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, and it is still going on.

Now there’s nothing particularly astute about these observations of mine. We’ve all witnessed the culture war at least through the terms of our last two presidents. In fact, one of them got impeached.

That impeachment seemed to be over sexual habits. The nation’s first impeachment, not coincidentally, took place only three years after the Civil War ended and was initiated by, yes, the Republicans, too. But the GOP in those days were staunch advocates of civil rights for the freed African-American slaves, a goal not shared by President Andrew Johnson. Although a union loyalist and the only Southern senator to remain in Congress, Johnson as president was seen by Republicans as siding too often with white Southerners during Reconstruction — among other things, revoking Gen. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres and a mule to former slave families and vetoing the nation’s first Civil Rights Bill in 1866.

Considering what a backward mess Reconstruction later became, it’s easy to think not only that Johnson deserved to be impeached, but that he shouldn’t have survived by one vote.

Noted historian James Ford Rhodes, who was in college when the Civil War ended, later wrote of Johnson:

As (Massachusetts) Senator Charles Sumner shrewdly said, ‘the president himself is his own worst counselor, as he is his own worst defender.’ Johnson acted in accordance with his nature. He had intellectual force, but it worked in a groove. Obstinate rather than firm, it undoubtedly seemed to him that following counsel and making concessions were a display of weakness.

Sound like anybody we know?

Now I definitely am a Northerner. With only two brief exceptions, my current residence, New York, is the southernmost place I have lived in the United States. One of those exceptions was California in the Army. The more recent was Georgia where I worked a few months on the night desk at the Savannah Morning News, a genteel sort of newspaper where the front-page headlines were polite through three editions, all home delivery, but needed to scream in the fourth edition, which was sold on the street. I was just the New Yorker to produce those gory words.

One of the other editors told me how glad he was to see me: “Before you came, I was the resident Yankee,” he said. He was from Kentucky.

I apologized for an error one day by offering that I was just “a dumb Yankee.” The city editor, a clever guy, smiled at me and said, “Why, Sid, I think that may be redundant.”

What I don’t understand about the South would fill volumes — state’s rights, creationism, hillbilly music, homophobia, Rush Limbaugh. And what’s the deal with Nascar, thousands of people driving to a place to watch other people drive around in a circle?

Well, maybe there’s hope. Barack Obama, a guy described by many as black although he looks sort of tan to me, just won his party’s side of the Iowa caucuses.

Of course, the other winner is a creationist.

– Sid Leavitt