“If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans; which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; which has sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed and mutilated; which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves and planted agony at a million hearthstones — I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?”
This excerpt from the 1871 Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) speech delivered by Frederick Douglass served as an advance organizer of sorts around which was built the August 21 Cyclorama symposium “What Shall We Remember?: The Civil War Today.” Each of the five panelists (William Link, Michael Shaffer, Hari Jones, Christy Coleman, and Kahlil Chism), gave impassioned, perspective-specific presentations that addressed how the Civil War is relevant to us today — and those lessens from the war we always should remember.
After a spirited and, at times, tense Q&A, I reminded the audience that people then, as today, are complex, confused and conflicted. Often, we align ourselves with ways of thinking that are based on our education, profession, family and/or cultural beliefs, as well as politics and a host of other self-defining markers. Those of us in academia and related fields (research, museums, archives, etc.), also use primary documents and artifacts to bolster our beliefs and to prove, once and for all, that we are right — or at least closer to right than a layperson or a colleague with an opposing view.
To close that evening’s program, I asked those in the audience to mentally transport themselves to the year 2164. I then asked if they would be able to know — even with an arsenal of primary documents and artifacts before them — the intimate thoughts and beliefs that guided the actions of the 317-plus million people in the United States in 2014. Hardly. My message to the audience, and my point that evening, was simple — we know a lot about the Civil War and the people of that time, but we do not — indeed, we cannot — know everything.
Researching on my own, and listening, as I have, over the past four years to 55-plus presenters (scholars, educators, historians, actors, artists and performers), I have learned one thing about the Civil War and its legacy — we never will know most of the stories of the almost 31.5 million souls who lived in the United States in 1860. To my way of thinking, the Civil War is a mandate. We must, as best we can, and as often as we can, share our lives with those whom we feel are most different from us. Only from personal knowledge of “the other” will we ever understand it. From that understanding might come compassion, from that compassion might come respect, and from that respect, might come genuine reverence for life — in all its complex, confused and conflicted manifestations.
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