Democrats and Republicans Have Never Been Further Apart in Their Understanding of the Civil War Era Since Reconstruction

(55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry enters Charleston, SC on February 21, 1865)

Yesterday President Joe Biden delivered a campaign speech at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where on June 17, 2015 nine church members were murdered by a young white supremacist.

Biden’s speech, along with recent comments on the Civil War by Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, have solidified the two major political party’s positions in relationship to the legacy of the Civil War and its use for political purposes.

You only have to go back a few decades to find politicians in both parties embracing a “reconciliationist” narrative of the war and even elements of the Lost Cause. The legacy of emancipation was often pushed to the background and rarely given voice other than in moments when politicians were courting the Black vote.

This gradually changed in the years after the Civil Rights era for a number of reasons. According to historian Robert J. Cook:

A new generation of black politicians, aided by paradigmatic shifts in historical interpretation demanded government recognition for their understanding of the role that slavery and equal rights had played in the struggles of the Civil War era. At the start of the twenty-first century, federal officials scampered to integrate these calls into an updated birth-of-freedom narrative that acknowledged the once-marginalized emancipationist memory of the Civil War without jettisoning every component of the old reconciliatory discourse. (p. 211)

We can see the culmination of this shift in public memory in former president Barack Obama’s 2015 eulogy of Rev. Clementa Pinckney at Mother Emmanuel in Charleston.

For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens.  (Applause.)  It’s true, a flag did not cause these murders.  But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge -- including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise -- (applause) -- as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride.  (Applause.)  For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.  We see that now.  

Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers.  It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought -- the cause of slavery -- was wrong -- (applause) -- the imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.  (Applause.) It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.  It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better, because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races striving to form a more perfect union.  By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace.

The speech was delivered just as the Civil War sesquicentennial was drawing to a close. Obama offered the congregation and the nation the clearest statement to date of the connection between the nation’s continued fight for racial justice and hope for the future and the legacy of white supremacy and the history of the Confederacy’s fight for slavery.

Whatever clarity Republicans acknowledged on this issue at the time was fleeting. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley continued to waffle on recognizing the white supremacist roots of Confederate symbolism. Though Donald Trump called for the removal of the Confederate flag in 2015, he quickly shifted his position once it became politically expedient to do so. By 2017 he was defending the removal of monuments honoring Confederate leaders.

The Black Lives Matter Movement, violent white nationalist rallies in defense of Confederate monuments, and news of police brutality pushed the two parties even further apart and helped to solidify their respective positions around the memory of the Civil War era and specifically the legacy of emancipation and racism.

Biden’s address yesterday in Charleston has cemented this shift for the foreseeable future, but the president added a new element to the narrative, namely the Lost Cause. In fact, if I am not mistaken this is the first time that a president has referenced the Lost Cause in a major speech. It is most certainly the first time it has been referenced in a critical manner.

Look, after the Civil War, the defeated Confederates couldn’t accept the verdict of the war: They had lost. So, they say — they embraced what’s known as the Lost Cause, a self-serving lie that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states’ rights. And they’ve called that the noble cause.

That was a lie, a lie that had — not just a lie but it had terrible consequences. It brought on Jim Crow.

So, let me be clear for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. (Applause.) There is no negotiation about that.

Now — now we’re living in an era of a second lost cause. Once again, there are some in this country trying — trying to turn a loss into a lie — a lie, which if allowed to live, will once again bring terrible damage to this country. This time, the lie is about the 2020 election, the election which you made your voices heard and your power known.

Before proceeding, I do want to point out that I don’t believe that comparisons between the Lost Cause and the “Big Lie” (election denialism in 2020) are particularly helpful. The Lost Cause was complicated and evolved over decades and manifested itself in so many different ways, from how white southerners mourned their Civil War dead to how it was leveraged to reinforce Jim Crow segregation at the beginning of the twentieth-century.

Biden also used the occasion to comment on the ongoing history wars, situating Democrats on the side of addressing the hardest questions about our collective past in museums and our classrooms.

That’s not new in America. Every stride forward has often been met with ferocious backlashes from those who fear the progress, from those who exploit that fear for their own personal gain, from those who traffic in lies told for profit and power.

But here in Charleston, you know the power of truth. Less than a mile from here was once a port where almost half of all enslaved Africans were trafficked to North America and forced on our shores.

And now you have a world-class museum there to tell the truth about the original sin. (Applause.) And it matters.

And I want to thank former Mayor Jim [Joe] Riley for his leadership, who saw to it the museum was built, and for all of you who made that happen.

And with your help, I made Juneteenth the first federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Day.

He continued.

With your help, we established the national monument — monument in honor of Mamie and Emmett Till because we heard Mrs. Till’s call — the mother of a 14-year-old son who was lynched and whose body was mutilated, but the mother insisted on an open casket at his funeral because she said, “Let the world see what I saw.” (Applause.)

The truth matters. It always matters. We can’t just to learn — choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. We should know the good, the bad, the truth of who we are.

And finally, a reference to Denmark Vesey.

Folks, let me close with this. Denmark Vesey arrived in Charleston enslaved — one of too many — too many from a distant shores, wrenched from painful — on a painful journey, not to a promised land but to a land that promised to deprive them of freedom.

But even though they arrived in the land where the life and rife of [a land that would be rife with] pain and persecution, they still believed they had promise, and the Black Church kept them moving.

They had faith. They found scripture. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, evidence of things not seen.

Vesey had his kind of faith. He became a carpenter and a movement leader concerned with the least among us. That’s why he helped found this very church 200 years ago. Only 40 years after the elect- — Declaration of Independence, in this church, your church now, the Black Church has some — come to symbolize the faith and this purpose, to bear witness to those who are suffering, to bring the good news of a future to come, to follow its mission to be the light in the pathway of darkness.

That’s patriotism. That’s patriotism. To love something so much you make it better, no matter the struggle. A patriotism that inspired generation before us to believe that in America we can do and be anything we want to be.

It’s difficult to imagine a president from either political party closing a campaign address by celebrating a Black man who was executed for planning a slave insurrection.

There was nothing inevitable about the way memory of the Civil War became solidified among Democrats and Republicans. There is also nothing inevitable that the two political parties will remain so far apart on this issue either. Any number of factors will likely continue to shape the politicization of Civil War memory.

As a historian I sometimes worry that the Democratic embrace of the legacy of emancipation has distorted the extent to which white Americans supported emancipation during the war and racial justice during the postwar period.

As a citizen, however, I am much more concerned about the extent to which the Republican Party’s rhetoric about the Civil War and the history of slavery reflects a clear MAGA agenda that has largely turned its back on issues of racial justice.

That can certainly change, but Republicans are going to have to do some soul searching in the hope of once again embracing the “better angels of our nature.”