Jelani Cobb, writing with some verve and clarity for The New Yorker, as is his habit, thoroughly destroy’s General John Kelly’s assertion to Fox News Trump apologist Laura Ingraham that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man fighting for his native blood and soil against the terrible power of a Federal ‘gubment unwilling to “compromise” to placate the tender sensibilities of the slave holding states.
Any reasonably sentient student of U.S. history realizes that the founding of our flawed-in-inception Republic, and a good deal of its history in the ensuring eighty-five years or so leading up to the Civil War, were exercises in compromising the ideals of liberty and fraternity expounded in its founding documents to the utterly antithetical practice of enslaving fellow human beings.
A fact that apparently escapes, with little or no pursuit, the head of Kelly, but not that of History’s more astute observer, Jelani Cobb.
“Kelly’s argument that the war in which Lee fought was caused by an inability to compromise is even more tortured. The history of the Republic to 1860 is literally a history of compromises designed to reconcile varying positions on slavery. A short list of those agreements would include the removal of the anti-slave-trade passage in the Declaration of Independence; the three-fifths, slave-trade, fugitive-slave, and Electoral College clauses of the Constitution; the Northwest Ordinance, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and, on the verge of the war, the proposed Crittenden Compromise, which would have prohibited federal abolition of slavery in the South. By 1858, when Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech, it had become clear that more compromise could no longer stave off a national reckoning with slavery. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall,” he wrote. “But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Cobb then articulates precisely why many Americans take comfort in Kelly’s lie that good did not do enough to reconcile itself to evil, leading to the ugliest and bloodiest episode in our history.
“The idea Kelly articulated—that the Civil War resulted from the blunders of politicians who failed to act imaginatively enough to avert it—has appeal for obvious reasons. It erases the moral culpability of slaveholders. It excuses contemporary white Americans from feelings of guilt that this nation was nearly torn in half because of a debate over whether black people are human beings. As the historian W. E. B. Du Bois observed eighty years ago, the end of the war presented both the North and the South with reasons to avoid a truthful retelling of the war’s origins. Northerners, he argued, disdained the fact that saving their Union required the assistance of nearly two hundred thousand black soldiers, and demurred on the subject of the war altogether. Southerners, aware that history would judge them for fighting to their last for the right to buy, sell, rape, breed, and exploit human beings, retreated into a fantasy that the war was due to the vagaries of federalism.”
And places the blame for this latest exercise in magically not thinking about difficult facts precisely where it lies (so to speak).
“It is not entirely implausible to see this strand of absolutionism appear again from the Trump Administration. Trump’s self-declared goal of making America great again is also a marketing campaign to make white people feel good again, even if doing so requires parting company with annoyances like facts, data, evidence, and, currently, the historical record. This is not a novel phenomenon, but the current decibel of this racialist noise is noteworthy. The more fundamental point, the one that Trump unwittingly articulated two months ago and Kelly confirmed on Monday night, is that, while April, 1865, marked the end of the war, the end of the hostilities is another matter entirely.”