The kerfuffle over Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s proclamation of April as his state’s “Confederate History Month” seems to have subsided. The governor, after a public uproar, amended his proclamation to include mention of slavery. Why slavery wasn’t included in the first place remains a mystery; even the most poorly informed of Americans surely knows that slavery had something to do with the bloodiest conflict in our history.
Well, actually a great deal more than “something.” Efforts to downplay the importance of slavery in leading to the conflict are historical whitewash. The decade leading to the Civil War was marked by rising sectional discord over the question of slavery: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision, “Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. Lincoln’s election was well-nigh assured after the Democratic Party, at their 1860 Charleston Convention, split over — you guessed it — slavery.
I agree with Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general who prevailed over the Confederacy and later was elected to the U.S. presidency, on the whole matter. In his “Personal Memoirs,” Grant wrote of receiving Lee’s surrender at Appomattox:
“My own feelings … were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
I have little patience with the romance of the “lost cause.” No doubt, many brave men fought and died for the Confederacy. No doubt, they did so for a host of reasons, many benign. But the bottom line remains: the Confederacy was born of an attempt to protect slavery. And its defeat marked an important moment, not just in creating a durable union, but in extending — however imperfectly — the scope of human liberty.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.