Civil War

Today, April 12, is the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil, War, the firing on Fort Sumter. It was, as this post from the Britannica Blog points out, hardly the beginning of hostilities - the problem of slavery haunted the United States from its beginning - and more or less open warfare had been waged in the late 50s in Kansas - almost going national, when John Brown raided Harper's Ferry in 1859. But when the cannon balls started to fly in Charleston Harbor, there wasn't any going back....

The results of course - 4 years of warfare, 600,000 dead, massive destruction, and an imperfect but rather unmistakeable step closer to actual human decency. It is hard to say America saved its soul by fighting the Civil War - it took another 100 years for institutional racism to be eliminated (and even that, only in theory) - but it certainly helped. In some ways, it's taken even longer than that to acknowledge the basic facts of the war - the South managed to win the reconstruction, in the end - even 30 years ago, people who should know better could downplay the role of slavery in the war. Even now, there are plenty of folks who think they can pretend it was about state's rights or industrialization vs. agriculture or whatnot - a clash of cultures... It wasn't. It was Treason in defense of slavery. In the end, they didn't manage to destroy their country (in order to defend their right to own other human beings) - but they tried...

So to remember. And to remember what Confederacy stood for - slavery, racism, plutocracy, violence - and to note that, in the end, what we have is better than anything they could have given it.