“I consider involuntary slavery a never-failing fountain of the grossest immorality, and one of the deepest sources of human misery; it hangs like the mantle of night over our republic, and shrouds its rising glories.” John Rankin, Presbyterian Minister
“I have only a short time to live, only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for.” John Brown, 1856
“…slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude…It being among my first wishes to see some sort of plan adopted, by which slavery in this county may be abolished by law.” John Adams, Founding Father, 2nd President of the United States
“Every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart.” Theodore Dwight Weld, speaker, writer, abolitionist
“Slave power crushes freedom of speech and of opinion. Slave power degrades labor. Slave power is arrogant, is jealous and intrusive, is cruel, is despotic, not only over the slave but over the community, the state.” Elizabeth Van Lew, Richmond citizen and Union spy during the war
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Slavery is awful. It is the domination of another human, while forcing them to do labor, with no promise of compensation, food…or even the most basic care. Approximately 4 million people were under the chains of slavery in 1861. Slavery destroyed individuals, families, communities, and countries.
The horrors of slavery make this period of American history hard for many people to talk about. “It’s just so sad and ugly,” or “It makes me feel bad – I wasn’t there, and I had nothing to do with it. I don’t want to feel bad about something I didn’t do.” But to skip the hard parts of our past is passing up the opportunity to learn the most valuable lessons.
Sometimes, having a hero makes a hard story easier to digest – and there were heroes in the 1800’s. There were millions of Americans, both north and south, that railed against the evils of slavery. They screamed from pulpits, street corners, and podiums that slavery would ultimately cost the nation its soul, that it had to be stamped out no matter the cost. Some even preached the equality of all mankind – and were so tantalizingly close to success in the early days of Reconstruction that it hurts to imagine how close America came to truly fulfilling her promise.
Were all of them perfect? No, and that’s a ridiculous standard anyway. But the fact is they, even in their imperfection, were a force for good and change. When we teach the lessons of the Civil War, we should celebrate these bright matches in the terrifying darkness.
Since we’ve talked about what the Confederacy fought for, let’s celebrate those who stood against it:
Thaddeus Stevens
Stevens served as a Representative of Pennsylvania in Congress from 1859-1868. He was a founding member of the Republican Party, a staunch abolitionist, and advocate for equal rights. It’s fair to say, with no exaggeration, that he hated slavery and the slave holding south. His words from 1862 – “Abolition – Yes! abolish everything on the face of the earth, but this Union; free every slave – slay every traitor – burn every rebel mansion if these things are necessary to preserve this temple of freedom to the world and to our posterity.”
During the war, he created coalitions to ensure the Union war effort was funded, and kept constant pressure on the Lincoln administration to press the Confederacy as hard as possible. After the war, he was an advocate for Radical Reconstruction which would have forced the South (and the nation as a whole) to accept newly freed African-Americans as equals in everything – employment, politics, bureaucracy. He ultimately led the impeachment against Andrew Johnson because Johnson opposed Radical Reconstruction and sought to restore power to former Confederates without securing the rights of freed people. He died in 1868 without seeing his vision realized.
Thaddeus Stevens is a man to celebrate. He’s a hero who stood against the wealth and political clout of the Planter Aristocracy and, until the Myth took over, won.
Charles Sumner
Sumner served as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts from 1851-1874. Sumner was a staunch abolitionist and advocate for equal rights. In 1856, during the debate on whether to admit Kansas as a slave or free state, Sumner said this on the floor of the Senate about Andrew Butler, fellow Senator from South Carolina – “The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.” A couple of days later, Andrew Butler’s cousin, Preston Brooks, attacked Sumner with a cane while Sumner was at his desk in the Senate chambers. Brooks almost killed Sumner, who, once recovered physically, still took almost three years to recover from PTSD.
During his first speech on the floor of the Senate after he returned, some Southern Senators took offense at Sumner’s renewed attack on slavery. Sumner responded, “Say, sir, in your madness, that you own the sun, the stars, the moon; but do not say that you own a man, endowed with a soul that shall live immortal, when sun and moon and stars have passed away.” I mean – damn near killed for attacking slavery and walks back in with a mic drop. That is a man filled with the holiest of fires.
Sumner would join Stevens in the same efforts during and after the war. Sumner fought for equal rights for the newly freed peoples and…pretty much everyone else after the war. He repeatedly tried to remove the word “White” from naturalization laws, and ultimately believed that any sort of legal discrimination against anyone flew in the face of the Declaration of Independence.
Sumner wasn’t just an abolitionist, he was an advocate for the American Promise. If you need a light when exploring the darkness, Sumner is as close as you’ll get to the Batman signal.
Elizabeth Van Lew
A lifelong citizen of Richmond, and belonging to a reasonably well-to-do slave owning family, Elizabeth Van Lew was also kind of a badass.
Though Van Lew was raised in a household with slaves, she was educated in a Quaker school. Lew adopted the Quaker’s abolitionist beliefs, and worked to end slavery and the Confederacy.
During the war, Van Lew cared for wounded Union soldiers, passed information from Confederate prisoners to the Union, and helped Union prisoners and Confederate deserters escape.
Not finding that exciting or impactful enough, she started a literal spy ring in the Confederate capital to funnel information to the Union. It’s suspected that one of the spies was a maid in President Jefferson Davis’s mansion. Her spy ring was so effective that General Grant sent her flowers…several times. After the fall of Richmond, she was the first person to raise the US flag.
After the war, she was mostly an outcast in her home city – which she had to have known was the likely consequence. She managed to survive on the generosity of friends, but never expressed any kind of regret for her work.
Elizabeth Van Lew directly helped end slavery and the Confederacy, and she did it in one of the coolest ways possible. Let’s take Lee off the Good Guys list and replace it with Lew.
A Personal Story and an Anecdote
Most heroes aren’t perfect. Even our favorite action heroes always have a flaw – booze, women, failed relationships – they make the best heroes because they still fight through the darkness.
My ancestors owned slaves. That’s not something said with any amount of pride. Those ancestors shared my last name, and their actions, despite what they believed, are a scar on our name.
But before the outbreak of the Civil War, and before North Carolina seceded from the Union, my way-back, wealthy, slave holding Uncle wrote a letter to the Governor and other politicians in Raleigh. That letter said, in paraphrase, “I will free my slaves today if that saves the Union.” After the war started, the family’s young men of fighting age were sent west to Arizona – they didn’t want them to fight and die for a cause they didn’t believe in.
I’m sure in other ways, these people were backward as hell in their beliefs on race and equality. But when the moment came, they stared at the moment, challenged to support something they didn’t believe in to continue the life they knew and said…No. They believed in something more important than themselves, and their comfort, and were willing to give that up because of their convictions. I can take some pride in knowing I come from a bloodline willing to stand in the breach for what they believe.
…which leads to the anecdote. The war is full of quick moments that were captured in soldiers’ letters, diaries, and newspaper. Little moments like “Turn up For Richmond” or Sherman gifting Lincoln Savannah for Christmas carry so much gravity because of the immensity of the struggle.
Grant took command of the Union armies in 1864 and chose to stay in the eastern theater to oversee the campaign to eliminate the Army of Northern Virginia. As every other commander before him had done, he trained his troops, made plans for the campaign, and set off south to fight General Lee.
The first battle was the Battle of the Wilderness, fought in the forest, thickets, and brambles of northern Virginia. It was a brutal, nasty three-day fight where many men were killed by fire when the dry vegetation was lit during the battle. The fighting was close-up, even hand-to-hand, due to limited visibility. In the end, the Union army lost over 17,000 men in three days, the Confederacy over 11,000. (Since we played the casualty rate percentage game earlier, in this battle they were Grant: 14.88%, Lee: 16.68%. Suck it, Lost Cause.)
At the end of the battle, most soldiers in the Army of the Potomac expected they would pack up and head back north…like every general before had done. When they started marching and realized they were going south, the men in the ranks erupted in cheers. After all the fighting, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and years of being away from home, these men were excited that they were finally going to take the fight to, and out of, the Confederacy.
We don’t know WHY they fought, but every one of those men is a hero who deserves to be celebrated.
This is just a tiny taste of the many heroic figures who worked for a better day in the American 1800’s. Even a cursory Google search or quick chat with your favorite LLM can provide you with an almost endless list of heroes.
These are names we should celebrate – and our education shouldn’t include the greatness of Lee, but rather the courage and audacity of Lew. Instead of celebrating Stonewall’s marches, we should celebrate the walls of justice that were Stevens and Sumner. And we should celebrate the memory of all those who fought in blue.
That is how we take back our history.
SO WHAT ABOUT HISTORY? 
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