What Atlanta was versus what we became. And how that came to be?
Fully analyzing that journey requires consideration of the Civil War’s lingering impact today — 150 years after Union forces seized control of this city.
We suggest here that it’s important still to undertake the risky, painful journey of unpacking and reassessing history’s baggage in a contemporary light. Doing so can help make better sense of where we stand today. Most importantly, it can tease out who we really are – a people sharing a common heritage, whether we want to, or not. That commonality holds even when we’ve stood, or stand, along differing sides of that always-flowing river we call history.
By reconsidering the Civil War, we may learn more about ourselves — as individuals and as a larger community we call metro Atlanta.
Shakespeare had a point. What’s past really is prologue. That’s worth pondering in this age of division, when people of equal goodwill, but with differing viewpoints find it difficult to hold candid, productive conversations or reach mutually beneficial agreements. This is especially true around conversations of race today, but that’s far from the only subject where good people tend to talk past each other. There’s a long list of important matters where society in general and Atlanta specifically seems to do little but unproductively spin our wheels. Politics. Education. What it means to be a region. Insert your favorite here.
Humbly reviewing just how Atlanta emerged from the ruins of 1864 may help guide us today through study of what worked then — or what tactics, seen in light of today’s standards and sensibilities, now strike us an ineffectual or even abhorrent.
History should mean something in the place that the old LOOK magazine in 1961 called “the only major U.S. city ever burned to the ground by a hostile army.”
We all know, broadly, what happened next. Atlanta Constitution Managing Editor Henry Grady’s vision of a “New South” proved prescient.
History’s not that simple, though. Perceptions, passions and viewpoints tend to clash, depending on one’s location along a given era’s fault lines.
Southerner and Northerner. White and black. The planter class. The sharecropper. Person A. Person B. We all bring widely differing perceptions of reality to society’s square. In that behavior, we really are all alike.
In the age-old, American-style clangor of disparate views, societal priorities can careen from one trajectory to another. Seen over time, we call that history.
Henry Grady was right. The Civil War’s aftermath necessitated a New South.
Yet, few today would regret that history proved wrong Grady’s misguided belief that maintaining white supremacy would undergird the South’s postwar rebirth. Atlanta and the South had starring roles in the decades-long struggle to create a more-equitable society for all Americans, regardless of skin color.
How all that came to pass is worth another look. It will yield value, though, only if we can know and understand history in pure form, with minimal adornment, adulteration, wishful thinking or other flights of fancy.
Diligent study of what historians call primary sources is a good place to start in search of plain truth. That calls for stepping back in time. Read soldiers’ own accounts of the Civil War. Study speeches from that era. Intellectual rigor and honesty plead for reviewing both sides of the story, we believe. Be aware that, then as now, popular sound bites of the day might be lacking in objective fact, but brimming with partisan distortions.
So how can we earnestly reconcile past events with the natural human tendency to interpret, color or even skew their meaning? Beliefs today can differ so radically among individuals and groups that attaining any common perception seems difficult, if not bordering on impossible.
It can help to know that such has always been the case. People have always been vulnerable to popular passions fired by human emotions. Confusion, fear, the drive for survival and the like have each eternally wrestled with, and traveled alongside, history’s upheavals.
History’s accuracy can thus suffer as it’s carried across time atop a tide of human emotions. Hard fact can be diluted over time as doses of wishful thinking at best, or fiction at worst, are injected.
It’s easiest to believe what we most want to believe. Convenient narratives that provide affirming comfort are the most-readily absorbed into individual minds and differing camps of popular culture.
Dispassionate study can help lead us back toward the truth, which is where history can best guide us forward to a better future.
As we do on most anything in these great United States, we still disagree over even the causes and meaning of the Civil War.
Yet, we seemingly all agree on the war’s terrible toll exacted in blood, lives, disruption and treasure. The suffering that resulted made no discrimination along lines of state, race, class or anything else.
Recognizing that is as good a place as any to begin rededicating ourselves to better understanding that momentous human struggle of long ago — and what it can tell us today.
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