I hope everyone will have a happy and safe Memorial Day Weekend. Though in theory we should be spending this time honoring the memory of America's brave men and women who have served their country, I suspect most people think of Memorial Day more as a seasonal marker---the kickoff of summer and the end of a school year, a time for first picnics and final exams. It is rather shameful that we can often cite the millions of dollars that the latest blockbuster pulled in at the theaters, but don't know how many people have died defending our nation.
I've started reading a very thoughtful book by historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust called This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. It's part of my summer resolution to read some Civil War material every day to get ready to teach my first Civil War class next spring semester. Like Faust's other works, it is well-written and absorbing, and provides details on an aspect of the war that is often overlooked by historians. The statistic of approximately 620,000 fatalities is so horrific (especially when one considers that it equals roughly the American causalities of the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War together) that it blurs the individual suffering and trauma. The Civil War dead become lump sums, big numbers, mass reports---no longer are they sons, brothers, fathers, and lovers. The photographs of unburied corpses, haunting as they are, have become so familiar from their use in textbooks that students, accustomed to high body counts in video games and movies, breeze by them with barely a glance. The Civil War has, with the passage of time, become a commodity, an event that sells books, sets the scene for popular novels and films, and provides the backdrop for re-enactors to gather to pursue the minutiae of history. We are nearly 150 years removed from the conflict that decided America's destiny, far enough away in time that our ancestors'actions can seem quaint and romantic and deluded, all at the same instant.
I worry that a day might come when we forget the Civil War, or---perhaps even worse---we turn it into something 'Disney-fied,' as wholesome and sanitized as the pirates of the Caribbean. I don't want to ride a wagon through a fake battlefield and watch an android Lee order a charge against a holographic McClellan, or listen to a catchy marching tune while grinning 'bummers' chase chickens and belles before torching Atlanta. I want the Civil War to remain as it should be: grim, troubling, disturbing. I want people to continue to debate why their forefathers fought, dissect where the American genius broke down. I want us to have to face the issue of slavery and own up to the tragedy of an institution that was so at odds with our stated ideals.
Most of all, I want Americans to remember that every one of those 620,000 men was someone who mattered. He left behind people who loved him, depended on him. Each man who died in blue or in gray had friends and family, was a member of a community. Someone missed him when he was gone. And that figure contains only men enlisted in service; untold thousands of civilians, male and female, slave and freedmen, died as collateral damage in this war, were killed by accidents or succumbed to diseases and deprivations induced by the conflict. They mattered too. With every drop of American blood in the Civil War, our bright future as a unified, strong, and free people was purchased.
On this Memorial Day, as you honor our most recent service personnel, especially our young Americans serving in the MIddle East, please also take a moment to remember and honor the heroes and heroines of the American Civil War.
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