April 15, 2016

Word: What the Civil War was really about

Ken Burns on the myth that the Civil War was about state' rights - a myth, incidentally, that both conservatives and liberals have bought into.

Ken Burns - You know, we’ve grown up as country with a lot of powerful symbols of the Civil War in popular culture that would be ‘Birth of a Nation,’ D.W. Griffiths’ classic, and ‘Gone with the Wind,’ of course. And in that, it postulates, among other things, both films, that the Ku Klux Klan, which is a homegrown terrorist organization, was actually a heroic force in the story of the Civil War. So it’s no wonder that Americans have permitted themselves to be sold a bill of goods about what happened, oh, it’s about states’ rights, it’s about nullification, it’s about differences between cultural and political and economic forces that shaped the North and the South.”

But Burns recommended that Americans read South Carolina’s Articles of Secession to get the real story on why the states went to war against each other.

They do not mention states’ rights. They mention slavery, slavery, slavery. It is much more complicated than that, but essentially the reason why we murdered each other — more than 2 percent of our population, 750,000 Americans died; that’s more than all the wars from the Revolution through Afghanistan combined — was over essentially the issue of slavery.

The main American theme, I think, is freedom. But we also notice that race is always there. Always there. When Thomas Jefferson says all men are created equal, he owns a couple hundred human beings and he doesn’t see the contradiction or the hypocrisy and doesn’t free anybody in his lifetime and sets in motion an American narrative that is bedeviled by a question of race.

1 comment:

Capt. America said...

Of course TJ felt the hypocrisy, but the bank owned
his slaves. He never did. He had to mortgage them
to pay for them at the port. He could not attempt to free them
without going to prison for debt, and they would without
question end up being not free and worse off.
Slavery was the biggest investment the northern
banks had. Talk about hypocrisy...