Thomas Nephew concludes his excellent month-long reverie in newsrackblog.com on the real meaning of the Civil War with reflections on the Lost Peace and the century-long denial of rights to African Americans that followed the bloodiest conflict in American History. The series had its genesis in Virginia's proclamation of "Confederate History Month" -- a perverse celebration of racists, slave-masters, and traitors -- which initially attempted to gloss over the grim fact that the South's "peculiar institution" was at the root of the conflict. Nephew states:
"Great accomplishments -- the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments -- lay ahead at the end of the Civil War, but they also seemed to expend the remaining anti-slavery, pro-equality political capital and energy available. As time would show, they could be circumvented and mooted by Jim Crow laws, the terrorism of lynchings and pogroms, and the accretion of legal rulings vitiating their original intent. Frederick Douglass's prophecy in war time -- "We are not to be saved by the captain, but by the crew" was good enough during war time, and while that captain lived. By 1875, Douglass would be asking, "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?" One suspects he knew it was a rhetorical question. There would be almost nothing left over to address the needs for help and the needs for safety of a black population increasingly at the "mercy" of surrounding whites in the South."
In reflecting on the events of 1861 to 1865, Nephew reminds us that we should not celebrate of the stubbornness with which the South, and indeed the nation, for centuries has sought to perpetuate a legacy of white supremacy, but recollect and honor the lost opportunity for racial justice for which so many fought and died.
