The Father of Waters Flows Unvexed to the Sea. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 4, 2013.
Mead:
150
years ago on the Fourth of July, the Siege of Vicksburg ended in a glorious
American victory, and the secessionists lost their last bastion on the
Mississippi River. With the Army of Northern Virginia also being beaten back
from the ridges and hilltops of Gettysburg, July 4, 1863, was the day when
Dixie started its fall.
I am a
son of the South and grew up steeped in its legends, its loyalties and its
lore. I am proud of the courage my slaveholding ancestors displayed, though sad
that such courage was devoted to so sorry a cause. I am deeply grateful to
Abraham Lincoln for doing what my ancestors could not do on their own: freeing
their slaves from the curse of bondage and freeing my family from the curse of
slave owning.
The
Civil War was a war of liberation, not a war of conquest or aggression. That
terrible war began the liberation of the white south as well as the black
south, and more and more southern whites have come to understand that as the
generations have passed.
Some of
my first political memories date from the centennial of the Civil War, when the
Civil Rights movement was reaching its climax and the post-Reconstruction
settlement of southern politics was going down to the same ruin that the
slaveholding south faced in 1865. My family like many other families was
bitterly divided by that movement, a fading echo of the bitterness of the Civil
War itself.
It was
fitting that Vicksburg fell on July 4; it was fitting that the great Civil
Rights bills were passed during the Civil War’s centennial — and it is fitting
that America observes the 150th anniversary of the war under the leadership of
an African American president. I don’t like all the decisions our President
makes, but I would not want to live in a country where a person of color was
barred, formally or informally, from holding the highest office in the land.
For
many generations, the feelings of many white southerners about July 4, 1776
were shadowed by their feelings about April 1865 when they ‘drove old Dixie
down’. Lots of people knew the words to “Good Old Rebel”:
I hates the yankee nation, and everything
they do
I hates the declaration of independence,
too;
I hates the glorious union, tis drippin’
with our blood;
I hates striped banner, I fit it all I
could.
Southern
whites weren’t and aren’t the only people with a complicated relationship to
our national history, of course. The feelings of many black southerners about
1776 were and are also clouded: by 90 years of slavery and another 90 years of
cruel discrimination and race rule. Healing is slow; that is the nature of deep
wounds.
The
fall of Vicksburg was a step towards the fulfillment of the promises made in
Philadelphia. 150 years later, we should remember, gratefully, this glorious
day in the annals of our nation, and spare a moment from our celebrations to
remember the brave men who gave their lives so that the promise of the
Revolution would not be lost.
Michael
Beschloss has posted a photograph of a Union fortification outside Vicksburg,
taken soon after the city’s fall. Take a look, and remember that July 4 was
only the beginning of a very long and complicated story that is still unfolding
in our time.
