The Civil War did not end in 1865. In fact, it is still being fought as a battle over collective memory. Very basic facts about the war remain in dispute, even in college classrooms.
What caused the conflict? Why did soldiers fight? Did states have a legal right to secede? Was Abraham Lincoln really opposed to slavery? Were Confederate generals heroes whom the United States should honor? Was Ulysses S. Grant a butcher who won only by sacrificing more men than Robert E. Lee could afford to lose?
Was the Civil War even a war?
Attempting to answer these questions can put a teacher squarely in someone’s bullseye. I can’t entirely blame high school teachers who evade candid truths in the face of angry parents, school boards, and powerful public officials—local and at the very highest levels. But sanitizing the most tortuous period in American history does a disservice to the roughly three million people who served, the hundreds of thousands who died, and the four million Black Americans who were enslaved when the war began.
Start with that last question. The United States never declared war on the Confederacy, because Lincoln refused to recognize it as a legitimate nation. The Southern states, he maintained, had never legally left the Union. The federal government therefore called the conflict a rebellion. Yet it was also a civil war in every practical sense—and the Supreme Court recognized it as one while the fighting was still underway.
Even its name became part of the argument: the Civil War, the War of the Rebellion, the War Between the States, and even the War of Northern Aggression.
On its cause, however, the evidence is clear. Slavery was the central issue driving secession. The secessionists themselves said so. Mississippi declared, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens proclaimed that the new government rested upon Black inferiority and slavery.
I encountered the contrary argument firsthand. In 1968, my Civil War history professor at Case Western Reserve University, Bertram Wyatt-Brown—a protégé of the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward—told our class that he would fail any student who identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
But why states seceded and why individual soldiers fought are more complex.
Most Northern soldiers initially fought to preserve the United States, not to abolish slavery. Southern soldiers fought for many reasons as well—loyalty to their states, defense of home, comradeship, social pressure, and, for many, the preservation of slavery and White supremacy.
Robert E. Lee embodies the contradictions. He opposed secession and called slavery a “moral & political evil,” but he was no abolitionist. In April 1861, after more than three decades as an officer in the United States Army, Lee was sounded out about taking command of the federal forces being assembled to suppress the rebellion. Instead, after Virginia seceded, he resigned his commission. He chose state over country. Only two weeks earlier, Virginia’s convention had voted against secession.
Lincoln was equally complicated. He had long opposed the expansion of slavery, but he also was no abolitionist and initially made preservation of the United States his overriding objective. The Emancipation Proclamation was a military measure, but Lincoln also called emancipation an “act of justice.” It did not apply to the loyal slave states or to designated Confederate areas already under United States control. Its limits reflected constitutional, military, and political calculations. By 1865, however, destroying slavery had become inseparable from federal victory, and Lincoln had pressed for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Then came the battle over memory.
After the war, former Confederates fashioned the Lost Cause, which minimized the central role of human enslavement. States’ rights took its place. Lee became the noble Christian warrior, while Grant became the butcher who overwhelmed a superior general with unlimited manpower.
Monuments helped etch that interpretation into granite. So did veterans’ groups, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and generations of textbooks. Reconciliation between White Northerners and White Southerners celebrated the bravery of soldiers on both sides while pushing slavery—and Black Americans—out of the story.
We can recognize the courage of Confederate soldiers without disguising the cause of the Confederacy. We can admire Lee’s military abilities without turning him into a saint, acknowledge Grant as a general of remarkable resilience, and confidence, and recognize Lincoln’s racial prejudice without ignoring his role in destroying slavery.
William Faulkner understood the difficulty of escaping history, particularly as a Mississippian. Ghosts of Black tragedy and the Civil War prowl through his dark, sometimes almost impenetrable fiction like unquiet, anxious skeletons refusing to remain underground. The Unvanquished follows the Sartoris family through war and Reconstruction. In Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen tries to build a Southern dynasty, only to have slavery, race, and the Civil War help destroy it. In Go Down, Moses, the descendants of slaveholders and enslaved people remain bound together generations later by blood and history.
Faulkner’s Black and White characters live in a South that cannot escape its past. He summed it up in one famous sentence: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Civil War issues are covered in “Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Fort Pillow Massacre,” in Forgotten Battles and American Memory; “Deliverance and the Fourth Maine Light Battery,” in Turning Points; and “Iron, Slavery, and Civil Rights,” in Hallowed Ground., as well as the book titled SIEGE–Civil War South Carolina: Race, Politics, Battles, and Memory.
Forgotten Battles and American Memory
SIEGE–Civil War South Carolina: Race, Politics, Battles, and Memory
Featured-image caption
Devon Henry, whose Black-owned contracting company removed Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue, stands on its empty pedestal in September 2021. Erected in 1890, the monument became a focal point of racial-justice protests after George Floyd’s murder. Henry accepted the controversial assignment after larger contractors declined it, and the statue came down following a year-long legal battle—a modern chapter in the struggle over Civil War memory.
The statue was removed on September 8, 2021, after litigation delayed the state’s plan.
“Through distortions and omissions, White Southerners constructed a version of history that absolved them of blame.“
Caroline E. Janney, John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War and Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, University of Virginia
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