NO, HISTORY CANNOT BE ERASED

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” Abraham Lincoln wrote to Congress in December 1862.

Wednesday night, in her impassioned and reasoned impromptu plea to her colleagues in the South Carolina House of Representatives, fellow Republican Jenny Anderson Horne broke through a logjam of tactical delays so that her state – and the entire South – might finally address history.

We’ve long heard the argument that the War Between the States (there was nothing civil about it) was over states’ rights rather than slavery – a bogus case, at best, when one considers the 1857 Dred Scott v Sanford Supreme Court decision that stripped Northern states of their right t0 defend the human liberty of escaped slaves. No, the South decisively denied states’ rights. Or at least its powerful slaveholders did, when they wanted.

Like Horne, I have Southern roots – not as many or as distinguished as hers, but enough to make me aware of the complications Southern whites faced. On my father’s side, the North Carolina Quaker identity long meant opposing both slavery and the bearing of arms. Theirs was a difficult witness, long before the war and in its destructive aftermath. And I have a copy of the memoirs of another family member, my great-great-grandmother’s uncle, an Ohio farm boy who died from wounds in the Battle of Stones River, one of the deadliest outbreaks in the war. My mother’s side included slaveholders and soldiers, mostly Confederate, along with a wealthy individual not enlisted who gunned down isolated Union troops he ambushed as a guerrilla – one who was apparently hanged, not that we ever heard that story. Instead, it was always my great-great-grandfather’s long walk to deliver the last message of a comrade to his family – the journey that planted the family in Bowling Green, Missouri.

Still, I’ve long been offended by the flying of the Confederate flag. Its intention has been all too blatant … and racist. Period.

If you want another view of the cost of slavery on the South, black and white, look up Wendell Berry’s essay, The Hidden Wound, arising in his own childhood in Kentucky. He saw through any pretense of honor masking at least one prominent citizen.

Most remarkable in Horne’s speech was her readiness to move beyond family identity. As she told the Washington Post after the vote, “It’s not about ‘Oh, my great-grandfather was killed in the Civil War and he gave his life.’ That’s not what we are here to talk about. What we’re here to talk about is what’s in the here and now. And in 2015, that flag was used as a symbol of hatred.”

As she emphasized, “We’re not fighting the Civil War anymore. That war has been fought. It’s time to move forward and do what’s best for the people of South Carolina.”

All the people.

What a contrast to Rep. Michael Pitts, a white Republican, who had told the House earlier in the debate: “I grew up holding that flag in reverence because of the stories of my ancestors carrying that flag into battle.”

Maybe he should have heard the “into battle” part more clearly – battle against freedom for all. Battle, however indirectly, against his black neighbors, as well, and not just the North. And often in battle against the poor.

More telling for me was Rep. Eric Bedingfield, also a white Republican and defender of the flag, in his declaration: “I have wept over this thing. I have bathed this thing in prayer. I have called my pastor to pray for me,” before adding, “You can’t erase history.”

No, you can’t. The history is the war’s over – and the Confederate flag lost. Put it away. Look at the full history, then, black and white, rich and poor. As much as I love genealogy, it fits into a larger story — and rare is the family chart without shame or guilt or human failure somewhere.

History? The Confederate cause has been accurately described as a rich man’s war fought by the poor. I still wince reading of the brutal torture of pregnant women or the elderly at the hands of the Home Guard – in North Carolina, at least, comprised largely of men owning 20 or more slaves and thus exempted from Confederate Army service. We need to break out of the prevailing mythology or fairy tales and instead open out on the wider story stripped of its masks.

As for the prayers, you and your pastor weren’t listening – Moses could tell you about slavery in Egypt and the way Pharaoh’s losing army was swept away in the Sea of Reeds (or Red Sea). Maybe there are good reasons Cairo never bothered with its side of the encounter. Later prophets in the Hebrew Bible could tell you about slavery in Babylon and its emotional burden. It’s all there in the open to be read.

If anything, the decision to remove the rebel battle flag from the state capitol dome can be seen as a response to the flood of prayers in the aftermath of the Charleston church massacre. In the eyes of many, a photo of the accused killer and the flag said everything. In contrast to my fellow citizens — or my fellow Christians.

The reality could no longer be ignored. It was all about racial hatred.

The Post report continues: “Some call it the war between the states, some call it the Civil War,” Pitts said, defending the Confederate flag. “Growing up, in my family, it was called the war of Northern aggression; it was where the Yankees attacked the South, and that’s what was ingrained on in me growing up.”

Hidden in that defense is a slap at the rest of the country. Black and white. Along with a denial of what the North experienced as escalating Southern aggression in the decades building up to Fort Sumter.

You can’t erase history. You can’t escape history. You can get trapped in it, when it’s distorted, the way propaganda does.

You can, however, make history. And break free.

The way Jenny Anderson Horne has, for us all.