In a message dated 2/8/2002 9:44:03 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:


> I'm not sure that the bloody conflict still scars the nation's psyche so
> much as it scars the southern psyche. Northerners tend to consider the
> civil war as one of many wars fought during the nation's history, not as
> THE war. Slavery certainly scarred the psyche of African Americans, as did
> the legal discrimination fostered by the Jim Crow laws in the south and the
> ghettoization in the North.
>
>

Anne - This ranges deeply into area of opinion on my part, but I think that
the psychic scars are just different for all involved. Certainly, many white
Southerners muse on what might have been and elaborate exercises in
justification such as "it wasn't really about slavery." Nobody wants to feel
as if they (or the ancestors) were on the wrong moral side. Many Southerners
wear their scars as battle ribbons for all to see, almost a histrionic need
for justification and redemption. Notice that I said many -- not a few and
not all.

For black Americans the impact is much more a continuing part of life. It
started with slavery and went through an emancipation movement to a civil war
to reconstruction to political betrayal by their allies to a long-term civil
rights movement to the still sneaking suspicion that full acceptance is a
relative thing.

As for "northerners," I have trouble conjuring up just what they are. I think
that southerners and westerners have some broader and more distinct sense of
identity, both to themselves and to others. Northerner is a somewhat limited
description, because the culture and heritage is both more diffuse and
obscure. Certainly the New England heritage is something that we can see and
feel as having a continuity, but the mid-Atlantic and Midwest seemed to have
melted into a bland sameness of identity and thought, almost as if they were
hiding from the rest of us. And just maybe part of that obfuscation is a way
of dealing with the guilt of the betrayal side of the outcome of
reconstruction. If the Civil War was really about slavery and civil rights
(which has always been my opinion), then why did the North make the
reconstruction about economic retribution and the subsequent betrayal of the
Southern black American about political advantage? History took from the
North the advantage of moral argument in the Civil War. Much of the South
wasted seven generations searching for that moral argument when there was
none on their side. Far better for the country -- and the South - had the
time and energy been spent on unification and moral reconciliation.

Bill Russell

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