Bryan Checo

No longer can statues dedicated to Confederates or Confederate flags be allowed to be displayed in public, nor should any other form of memorial or commemoration. Their removal is not erasing history but erasing false history—a course correction that should have occurred during Reconstruction. Included in these commemorations are the colors of Georgetown University–blue and gray–which were chosen to represent the newfound unity between the Northern and Southern students of the college. Allowing the gray to be included alongside the blue does a disservice to the men and women of the United States who fought and died to preserve the union and eliminate the institution of slavery. Why the added emphasis on the “United States” and “slavery”? For the former, Ty Seidule, ex-head historian for the United States Military Academy, writes, “The names we use matter. By saying Union and Confederate, Blue and Gray, North and South, we lose the fundamental difference between the two sides. The United States fought against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion.” Seidule continues, “The southern slaveholders were not fighting some foreign or lost-to-history army called the Union. The Confederacy fought the United States of America, the country I spent a career defending. I will call those men who fought to save their country and, by 1863, end the scourge of race-based slavery by their proper name—U.S. Army soldiers.” Those who remained loyal to the United States did not fight for a new country as a result of the illegal secession of the states of the Confederacy. These names also fail to account for those who remained loyal in the states of the Confederacy, such as the famed Winfield Scott, who hailed from Virginia. Before delving into the heart of Seidule’s argument, however, I also want to bring attention to something that should be a given—the underlying cause of the Civil War.

The Civil War was unequivocally over the institution of slavery. We as Americans need not look any further than the words of Confederates for why they took up arms in rebellion, “I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free niggers… now to suit me, let alone having four millions,” said one Louisiana artilleryman. Another Confederate from Kentucky wrote that, “We are fighting for our liberty… against tyrants of the North… who are determined to destroy slavery.” The hypocrisy present in these letters is almost too painful to read, but they highlight something important: these men made a distinction between their own liberty and the enslavement of other humans. Many claimed to be fighting against Northern tyranny to defend states’ rights. They were, in fact, fighting for states’ rights, as noted by Ty Seidule, but not those guaranteed to states within a federal system by the US Constitution. Rather, they were fighting for “the states’ rights to have slaves,” or in the words of Lincoln, “the liberty of making slaves of other people.” Slavery was not a protected right, but just another institution which the federal government could outlaw through democratic consensus. With the election of Lincoln in 1860, several Southern states decided that they could not concede defeat within the democratic federal system upon which the United States rests. Instead, they undermined the entire system by illegally seceding from the Union and launching an armed insurrection against the United States. In an effort to rebuff the “orthodox narrative” of the Civil War, Lost Cause propagators claimed that U.S. Army troops fought only to preserve the Union, not for abolition. This claim is somewhat disingenuous. Yes, there were those in the U.S. Army that did not fight primarily for abolition. At the outbreak of the war, many U.S. troops were not explicit about abolition as the prime reason for their enlistment. Rather, many enlisted to preserve the rule of law and uphold the Constitution. However, once Lincoln officially made the war one of abolition in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation, U.S. troops became much more explicit about the abolitionist aims of the war. Even those who had been conservative on the topic of slavery changed over the course of the war to embrace abolition as a prime motivator to achieve victory in the war. The war was no longer one that would pragmatically eliminate slavery, but one which sought to eliminate “that blighting curse [of] slavery” as an end in and of itself, in addition to the preservation of the Union. 

We now return to the heart of Seidule’s argument: why do names matter in history? Names and titles matter because history matters. One of the most important tasks given to the historian is to title past events. How do we choose to remember events and people? Collective memory is central to our identity as people and as a nation. As Seidule notes, “History is dangerous. It forms our identity, our shared story.” If we perpetuate Lost Cause mythology, we perpetuate the racism that we have long been wrestling with as a nation. Slavery is the elephant in the room that all Americans must wrestle with. By refusing to acknowledge the truth of the Civil War, the Lost Cause and the specter of slavery will continue to haunt the United States. Seidule bluntly observes, “After the Civil War, former Confederates, their children, and their grandchildren created a series of myths and lies to hide that essential truth [that the war was fought over the institution of slavery] and sustain a racial hierarchy dedicated to white political power reinforced by violence.” The failure of Reconstruction to stamp out ex-Confederates and white supremacists from their positions of power, Jim Crow, and the ongoing fight for civil rights all stem from this myth. Men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson did not fight to defend their homeland against a tyrannical Northern government. They, along with all Confederates, willingly chose to unleash a war that “left between 650,000 and 750,000 dead because… [they] fought to create a slave republic based on a morally bankrupt ideology of white supremacy.” Seidule does not mince his words when he writes “White southerners went to war to protect and expand chattel slavery.” Men who fought for this cause do not deserve to be celebrated in American history. Therefore, Georgetown should seriously consider removing the gray from our school colors. The continued inclusion of the gray not only undermines the university’s commitment to inclusion, diversity, and confronting its slaveholding past but also the United States’ efforts to move forward from the specters of its history.

Image: Georgetown University Library, Federal Troops on the Virginia side of the Potomac, with Georgetown’s campus seen at the top left, ca. 1863. Image sourced from https://guides.library.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=1052480&p=7642095

Bryan Checo is a second-year master’s student in the MAGIC program. His official focus is on Reformation-era Europe, however he is also interested personally in United States and German history, both of which he has taken multiple courses on.