The other narratives he calls the Union Cause; the Emancipation Cause which "emerged shortly after the war from black and white abolitionists and Radical Republicans"; and, the Reconciliation Cause, "a movement toward reconciliation that gained power in the late nineteenth century and remains widely evident today." The Lost Cause and Emancipation Cause narrative are largely mutually exclusive interpretations. But both mixed at various time with elements of the Union Cause and Reconciliation Cause narratives.
The Union Cause was the narrative based on the goal of preserving the Union, which was always the explicit formal war aim of the Union. With the Emancipation Proclamation, the destructive of slavery became officially part of the Union goals.
Gallagher quotes the antislavery leader Frederick Douglass defending the Emancipation Cause narrative and criticizing the Lost Cause version. He notes that Lincoln also laid out important aspects of this interpretive approach:
Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address foreshadowed two crucial parts of the Emancipation Cause. Delivered on March 4, 1865, it left no doubt about slaveholders’ role in precipitating the war and held up emancipation as an outcome that, to a significant degree, preceded final restoration of the Union. “One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it,” Lincoln said in regard to the situation in 1860. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party . . . anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.” At Gettysburg fifteen months earlier, Lincoln also had acknowledged the centrality of emancipation, placing “a new birth of freedom” alongside restoration of the Union as a fundamental goal of the United States war effort. [my emphasis]The reconciliation cause was the tradition of celebrating the reconciliation of Americans North and South - white Americans, that is. Gallagher writes:
The Reconciliation Cause included major military and political figures who advocated a memory of the conflict that muted the divisive issue of slavery, avoided value judgments about the righteousness of either cause, and celebrated the valor and pluck of white soldiers in both Union and Confederate armies. It was because of American traits showcased on Civil War battlefields, the reconciliationist interpretation maintained, that a United States economic colossus stood poised by 1900 to assume a central position on the world stage. Reconciliationists often pointed to Appomattox, where Grant and Lee behaved in a way that promoted peaceful reunion, as the beginning of a healing process that reminded all Americans of their shared history and traditions. Although sometimes combining with elements of the Union Cause and even the Emancipation Cause, the Reconciliation Cause most often was characterized by a measure of northern capitulation to the white South and the Lost Cause tradition. [my emphasis in bold]One part of this happy reconciliation of white people was that Northern whites agreed to look away from the fact that the national Constitution was being daily trampled upon by the denial of basic rights to African-American citizens in the former Confederacy.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south
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