Day 126. July 4, 1862. – Page 2 – We Saw a Grate Smoke Raise Up: Letters, Diaries, Wires from the Valley of the Late Rebellion

What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 130

“A new revisionism would place more distance between nineteenth-century Americans and us, the very distance that lets us see ourselves more clearly. If Americans resist the temptation to count every cost of the Civil War as a “sacrifice,” we might be more grateful for our simple good fortune and perhaps less self-satisfied with the people we have become. If we acknowledge that we inherit all of the past and not merely those parts we like to call our “heritage,” we would better respect the past’s complexity, weight, and importance. If we recognize that the Civil War did not represent the apotheosis of American ideals, we might look for that culmination in the future rather than in the past. All we need is the faith to approach these threatening years without a comforting story already in hand.”

Note: McClellan tells the Army of the Potomac today that “The enemy may at any time attack you. We are prepared to meet them…. Let them come and we will convert their repulse into a final defeat.”

Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 777-778; excerpt from THE MILLION DEAD, TOO, SUMM’D UP.

“And everywhere among these countless graves — everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them) — as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles — not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land — we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word Unknown.

(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot — but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?)”

Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battllefields Edward Linenthal P. 90

“Gettysburg became a place where, in the words of Angus W. McLean, a former governor of Virginia, Union and Confederate veterans alike could celebrate “a joint and precious heritage.” In reunions, patriotic rhetoric on numerous ceremonial occasions, and monument building, many Northerners– and many Southerners, as well– came to celebrate Gettysburg as an “American” victory. Because it was believed that the bravery and heroism shown by the contending Union and Confederate forces revealed a uniquely American form of commitment to heartfelt principle, Gettysburg became a heroic landscape, one that was seen, in McLean’s words, through a “golden mist of American valor.’”

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist P. 415-416

“Meanwhile, the unbending anger of former Confederates against Reconstruction morphed into their grandchildren’s suspicion of the New Deal, and the insistence on the part of white southern Democrats that measures against the Depression could do nothing to alleviate black poverty or lessen white supremacy. Compared to their dominance of US politics through much of the antebellum period, and their ability to consume disproportionate quantities of the fruits of antebellum national economic growth, the postwar southern white upper class achieved only a truncated triumph. Yet white folks still kept the black folks who toiled for them in poverty, forcing African Americans to take the implicit and explicit insults of life in the Jim Crow South in silence, lest they die brutally at the hands of mobs with or without badges. No wonder so many African Americans saw no chance for freedom but to leave.

Still, there were things that for all their power, even the pre-Civil War enslavers themselves had not been able to control. They could create a system that seemed to reduce African Americans to body parts: feet walking like a chained machine, hands on the block and hands picking, minds and nervous systems yielding revenue, providing entertainment and pleasure. Yet there were two ways to look at the body of African America, sutured together in the trauma of slavery’s expansion. The body had two forms, two instances. One profited enslavers, and in fact, white America, North and South, had again and again agreed to co-exploit this body, which was the new slavery of the cotton fields. This African America, created by expansion, was marked by vast suffering. In it, hundreds of thousands of people died early and alone, separated from their loved ones. Millions of people were lost by millions of people. By the water’s edge, they parted.

But tongues also spoke words that enslavers did not hear. Lungs breathed a spirit that would not yield. Enslaved men and women watched and guarded and stilled their blood, and trained their seed to wait. Even when enslavers realized, in particular moments, that enslaved people had created something else, an identity, a political unity, a common culture, a story, and a sense of how it shaped them and made them one, enslavers had forgotten, or willed themselves to forget. So people survived, and helped each other to survive, and not only to survive but to build. Thus, another body grew as the invisible twin of the one stretched out and used by white people. Eventually, the waiting had its reward. The body rose. African Americans took up arms and defeated the enslavers.”

Note: https://youtu.be/Ix-AMYos0Js Rev. Wright

Note: A year from today, Vicksburg falls.

went out to the Lutheran Sunday school celebration….

Always the next day it seems as if someone switched last night’s lay of the land with scenery from somewhere else. Exegeses. As if a great fever had drawn to a close. What could be seen of it in the dark can’t be seen now in daylight. Upper limb of the sun a thin round edge at horizon line for all Gettysburg who looked for it on this day.

NOT TODAY, SATAN!

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