“ . . . [H]e might even save our great . . . heritage!”

Seven-score and 12 years ago, a horrible and disfiguring American event drew to something approaching a close: the Civil War. To this very day, the wounds of that war lay open, festering, among so many Americans, even though none now exist who fought in it as the last Union and Confederate veterans died in the 1950s.

The war was the result of the Original Sin of the United States, where our founding fathers failed to accommodate the independence and god-given freedoms of slaves while they pronounced the same of the colonists, and instead allowed for the continuation of the subjugation of humans with the constitutional insult that each toiling slave only accounted for three-fifths of a human being. Said the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.” But it was, in fact, a land of slavery.  To our shame.  To our everlasting shame.

From the 1600s, slaves were imported to what is now the United States simply for the purpose of cheap labor. As the southern colonies began to develop, they also began to provide an abundance of crops and raw materials, like tobacco and cotton, which provided wealth and prestige to those who owned and controlled plantations.  But this wealth and prestige was premised and built on the backs of slaves.  The northern colonies and European nations benefitted from this arrangement, without a doubt.  But just as doubtless is the fact that the wealthy class in the southern colonies could only survive so long as their business was benefitted by free labor.

Abolitionists rose up in the face of slavery. They, like you today, could see no moral equivocation.  How could a human be kept as a slave?  How could a human, doted upon by their creator with all the gifts provided to every other human, be kept in bondage?  These abolitionists and political leaders strove to prevent the spread of slavery in the United States, fighting with word and sometimes with deed, to halt the progression of the degradation of the human spirit contained within those born into a life of horrible servitude.

Compromises were agreed to, in attempts to prevent slavery in some new states while allowing it in others. Territories were open game, and the fight took to the southwest and the west.  Kansas, especially, was a victim of this raging battle between those who would see slavery end, and those who would see it be evergreen.  Said Charles Sumner of the matter in 1856:

“But the wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government. Yes, sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, and to make it a hissing to the nations, here in our Republic, force — aye, Sir, FORCE, — has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power. There is the simple fact, which you will vainly attempt to deny, but which in itself presents an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like public virtues.”

Two days after giving this speech in the Senate, in which Senator Sumner proceeded to direct his words at two fellow Senators with whom he vehemently disagreed, he was beaten nearly to death in the Senate chamber by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who was a vicious proponent of slavery.

Such behavior causes one to recall the words of John Quincy Adams, when he wrote in 1820:

“But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?”

The failure of the Founding Fathers of our nation to properly address slavery in its moral aspect, instead of its financial and political aspect, led to decades of increasing hostility between those who would see slavery gone, and those would see it remain. How could the wealthy landowners of the southern states do anything but fight for the preservation of slavery?  Upon those whipped and scarred shoulders rested the fate of their pecuniary fortune.  To do away with slavery was an affront.  It was a threat.

And the threat became all the clearer to the southern states when Abraham Lincoln was elected President with not one electoral vote from the South. Lincoln was of the new Republican Party, which leaned heavily toward abolitionist goals, where the Democrats of that time were staunchly pro-slavery.  The threat, now, had become real for the southern powers and slaveholders.  To remain in the Union would be to agree to economic destruction.  And as power in the South was tied to economics, a threat to slavery was a threat to power.  The Master relied upon his power over slaves for his power in government.

Fort Sumter was fired upon. Southern states rebelled and declared themselves a Confederacy.  The Civil War began.

It is illogical to ascribe to the Civil War an ideological battle over states’ rights. It is illogical to ascribe any other false premise for the war, if one were to exclude slavery as the sole and determinate reason for its inception.  Slavery was the source of fear for the southern masters and their representatives.  Fear, that a freed population of slaves would spell the end of their reign.  Their fear was the same as monarchs in Europe decades before: They could be torn from their decadent thrones and tossed to the floor, in the interest of freedom of the people.

And what did the Confederacy fight to maintain? It is all too easy to simply declare, ‘Slavery.’  The word is a concept.  The word is an idea, cleansed and purified of all its resonant meanings.  Instead, we should direct our attention to what slavery entailed.  Imagine, if you will, having your teeth knocked out of your mouth with a chisel so that you would be forced to eat.  Imagine, if you will, having your body be mangled and disfigured.  Imagine, if you will, being whipped nearly to death.  Imagine, if you will, the one you love being raped, or you, yourself, being raped.  Imagine, if you will, being punished for reading, or making eye contact.  Imagine, if you will, your infant child being torn from your arms and sold to an unknown face.  Imagine, if you will, being separated from your wife or husband forevermore, in return for the sound of money exchanging hands.  Imagine, if you will, a life of servitude to one who would beat you to death if you dared speak up for your own thoughts or desires.  Imagine all the other horrors inflicted upon them.

Does it strain imagination? Is your mind repulsed?  Does it struggle to conceive of such evils?  Does it feel burdened by the knowledge that these things did occur?  Does your heart sink when hearing the words, ‘infant child at buyer’s option’?  For those words were posted in sales of slaves.  Men, women, and children did stand on platforms so that others may bid on their lives.  Would you not scream at your loved ones being torn from your grip, never to be seen again?

Men, women, and children with all the same depths of human emotion as you or I experience. Humans, like us, who looked up at the stars and wondered, or whose hearts fluttered at the sight of one they loved, or who desired the freedom to choose, for themselves, what their life should be.  Stand now and declare that they should be slaves, due to their origin and their skin color.  Declare them lesser, though they are your equal.

Can you do it? How could anyone?

This was what the Confederacy fought, ultimately, to preserve. The relationship of servant and master.  The use of humans as chattel and free labor.  The conservation of a society and economy built on slaves.

Slavery was the lever upon which all was moved. In its absence, what cause would there be for war?  What cause would there be to pick up arms?  The debate of states’ rights and federal power began in the first days of the republic, and yet none took up arms.  It was a conflict of political philosophy, capable of being debated in chambers, like rational humans.

But slavery? Slavery necessitated violence to preserve.  Violence, to ensure generations and lifetimes of the slow and vicious violence of bondage.

While Lincoln and the Union first fought to preserve the United States, it evolved into a referendum on slavery, and by the end of the Civil War, the mortal blow was struck to slavery. It would bleed out, writhe, and deal out blows in its death throes, but it would, finally and mercifully, die.

But how could masters live in a society with those they have convinced themselves to be inferior and beneath them? If you always considered a slave an animal, how could you live with animals?  And therein was the concussive blast that echoes to our modern day.  The superior needed to remain superior, and superiority necessitates an inferior partner.  And thus, from after the Civil War to the late 1900s, the color of one’s skin determined one’s inferiority.

The Original Sin was not so easily banished. Even a war, even thousands upon thousands of dead in fields of blood, could not be a baptism enough to wash away the sin.  The evil persisted.

Those who would not yield and give up the fight for superiority raised other generations of those who believed, fervently, in their own superiority. They erected statues to Confederate ‘heroes’ decades removed from the Civil War, in public places to remind those of a different color that the South Remembered, and those of dark skin should remember that they were inferior.  They monuments stood as memorials to the idea that slavery was no sin.  ‘You are still animals,’ such monuments must whisper to the descendants of slaves.  ‘Look upon what used to be, and what we wish still was.’  What other purpose could they possible serve?

How could they feel no shame? Who among us would erect such a monument glorifying the leaders of the Confederacy?  Who could honor the memory of a man like Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, who declared, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

How?

And so we come now to the present day debate, which should not be in debate. We who live today as Americans are inheritors of the great sin of our founding but also the march of progress ingrained in our national soul.  Our heritage is a painful one, but one which finally declared that slavery had no place in our United States.  Our heritage is one which, finally, declared that all are equal regardless of skin color, and should be treated as equally instead of segregated.  Our heritage is one which, most importantly, instills in us a drive to be better than our past.  Our Founders knew their failure with slavery would lead to problems in the future, but there was hope that future generations would do better by the founding decree of our nation, that ‘all men are created equal.’  We walk on, not with our eyes closed, but looking back from time to time to see how far we have come, and forward to see how far we have yet to go.

That is our heritage.

To what heritage, then, does our current President declare his affection? Said this President, regarding a candidate for governor of Virginia, a former slave and Confederate state, embroiled now in a debate about the removal of Confederate monuments, that this candidate may ‘save our great heritage,’ ‘save our great statues.’

‘Our great heritage.’

‘Our great statues.’

That would be the heritage of slavery. Of torture, rape, and murder.  Of immoral subjugation.  Of immoral and institutional racism.  Those statues would be the memorials to the same.

I say now, wholeheartedly, that this is not the heritage of America. It is the history of America.  It is a history to which we should look with sad, disapproving eyes, with words tumbling from our agape mouths, ‘Never again.’  It is an everlasting shame.  It is a mark we bear to remind ourselves of our demons, and our better angels.

The heritage of the Confederacy is not our heritage. To suggest that it is so is an affront to all with a sense of morality.

Tear down the monuments to the Confederacy. Place them in museums with the chains that bound slaves, with the remnants of slave ships, with the cane of Preston Brooks with which he beat Charles Sumner, alongside the whip of the master and the unmarked grave of the unremarked slave.

Place them in their appropriate context. Inform the public of what they represent.  Make the American public understand the pain that people of color must experience when looking upon them.  Remind all of our history so that it may not be repeated.

But tear them down from their perches in our open society. Make clear that the Confederate heritage is an immoral one.  Honor the dead who were compelled to fight if you wish.  The idea of the Confederacy, however, and all its political supporters and financiers, should be viewed with the disgust it deserves.

If the heritage of the Confederacy is yours, Mr. President, then I can say without reservation that you are no American.