1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [11]
Just as impressive, or more so, was the heroism of black men, women, and even children who were ready not just to be free but also to become Americans. They were partners, and sometimes leaders, in the project to reinvent their country—a project that was still incomplete at the end of the Civil War, but which had been even less complete at the close of the Revolution. The fact that these former slaves and children of slaves were ready to make it their project, to make it their country—almost from the moment that hostilities began—was perhaps the most strange and wonderful thing to come out of the war.
Americans today find it fairly easy to fathom the idea that there was a right side and a wrong side in World War II, a side that stood for freedom and a side that stood against it. It is possible to accept this even while acknowledging that both sides committed atrocities; that most Axis soldiers did not go to war in order to exterminate other races, nor most Allied soldiers to save them; and that in 1941, casual anti-Semitism was probably taken for granted among many GIs, as it also was in the clubby Anglo-Saxon milieu of Roosevelt and Churchill.
We find it harder, though—much harder than most people did in the 1860s—to accept that there was a right side and a wrong side in our own Civil War. It is difficult to fathom that millions of Americans could have fought as enemies of America. It is even harder to accept this when we come to realize that in some senses the Civil War really was, as some defiant Southerners still call it, a “War of Northern Aggression.”
Most accounts of the months leading up to war focus tightly on the parallel dramas in Charleston and Washington, as the clocks ticked away the last opportunities for peace. This is indeed an important, even essential, part of the story. But to get the full story of that moment in American history, it is necessary to go much farther afield: to the slums of Manhattan and the drawing rooms of Boston, to Ohio villages and Virginia slave cabins, and even to the shores of the Pacific. It is also necessary to consider people and ideas that were migrating from the Old World to the New. It is only then that this defining national event can truly be understood as a revolution, and one whose heroes were not only the soldiers and politicians.
That revolution began years before the first guns opened, as a gradual change in the hearts and minds of men and women, until suddenly, in the months before the attack on Sumter, this transformation attained irresistible momentum. One person at a time, millions of Americans decided in 1861—as their grandparents had in 1776—that it was worth risking everything, their lives and fortunes, on their country. Not just on its present reality, either, not on something so solid; but on a vision of what its future could be and what its past had meant.
Eighteen sixty-one, like 1776, was—and still is—not just a year, but an idea.
WALT WHITMAN UNDERSTOOD THIS, probably even before the actual year 1861 began. Sometime in mid-1860, when the war clouds were gathering, still distant, on the horizon, he sat down to write a singularly prophetic poem.
“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” is a mystical, surreal vision, an American version of Ezekiel’s wheel turning in the sky. Instead of a fiery wheel, though, floating in Whitman’s sky is the American flag. What does it stand for? asks the poet. Is it simply a piece of fabric? Is it an emblem of America’s prosperity, of the banks and merchant