There’s no escaping memory

Dear Unreconstructed,

It was wholly a pleasure to get your message objecting to our editorial page’s celebrating Lincoln’s Birthday, as we do every February 12th. For your sentiments perfectly balance the separate but equally outraged letters we get shortly after every January 19th, when we celebrate Robert E. Lee’s birthday.

In their own curious way, both reactions are a testament to the remarkable continuity of American history, evidence that the deep passions inspired by a terrible civil war are still with us. They may have attenuated with each passing generation, but they remain indelible.

Drawing that kind of crossfire every year has become an annual tradition around here. It’s kind of assuring in its own way-an assurance that the past persists. Indeed, that there’s no escaping it. However much we might want to. Or as Mr. Lincoln himself reminded all as a great civil war descended upon the country:

“Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We . . . will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.” And the war came.

In these latitudes, it is called simply The War, as if there had been no other. It remains the rock from which we are hewn. The passions it has left behind to this day, like the fossil record of some great geological upheaval, remind us we cannot escape the past. Each generation must make its own peace with it. Which is the function and responsibility of history-to reconcile present to past.

To give an account to the past of what we of the present have made of the heritage, light or dark, good or evil, free or slave, that it has left us.

Or we can keep fighting the past, as in your cry of outrage at our daring to honor Abraham Lincoln, whom you paint in the darkest colors, still fanning the dying embers of a hatred that once consumed us in the South, and almost consumed the Union.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri-half a century ago now-I worked at the Missouri State Historical Society, which was run by a little old lady who seemed to know everything about that state’s history worth knowing.

She could go back into the stacks and within minutes return with just the book memoir or volume of bound newspapers or dusty old legal document that some visitor needed.

Remember the days when little old ladies used to run the world? Every office seemed to have one, and the world was a much better place for it, too. They were like the noncoms in the Army, the sergeants who know what’s really going on, and can both guide those nominally in command of the outfit and keep those of us in the ranks in our place. Now women can be doctors and lawyers and corporate execs, and be just as mediocre as the men who play those roles. This is called Progress.

The little old lady at the historical society back then noticed that I wasn’t able to take my eyes off the huge mural that dominated its main reading room.

The artist had depicted the removal of families from their farms in obedience to the Union’s infamous General Order No. 11, which aimed to depopulate a large part of western Missouri. The object was to deny Confederate raiders like Quantrill the popular support they relied on. We called it pacification when we tried it in Vietnam, with equally unsuccessful and inhumane results. Families displaced, crops destroyed, traditions disrupted, ties broken, any sense of place lost forever. We knew it all here, too.

War will do that. Especially a civil war.

Gazing at the mural, I may have said something I thought philosophical about the terrible if necessary cost at which the Union had been preserved. In response, the little old lady just looked at me, took a deep breath, and proceeded to tell me a story about her own childhood:

“When I was just a girl growing up in rural Missouri, I once told my sweet, loving grandmother that, though I knew we were for the South in the Civil War, wasn’t she glad the North had won so we could have one country now? And my sweet, loving grandmother tenderly placed both her hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye and told me, ‘Child, if ever hear you say such a thing again, I’ll slit your throat from ear to ear.’ ”

Welcome to the land of luminous memory and darkest shadow that we call History. There is no escaping it. There is only making peace with it. Or raging against it forever.

To quote a general named Grant, let us have peace. It’s time.

God bless these still united states,

Inky Wretch

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com