Sorry to have missed you at the Southern. Hope all is well.

Interesting conversation lately.

I agree with Margaret's statement that the Civil War was more of a Greek tragedy than a morality play. I also agree with the following statement that Brooks made: “Moral judgment should not drive the narrative. But one can draw judgments from the findings and interpretations that emerge from one's research. However, rarely are they simple ones.”

I have been thinking about the concept of memory quite a bit, and how our memory of the past helps to shape the present. I am on a somewhat different track than most of your readers, however, so I have hesitated to comment.

I linked to the exhibit in New York that you posted, in which the newly rediscovered “Negro burial ground” where many of the men and women of colonial New York's slave population were buried. That exhibit is a powerful statement to yet another area of our nation's collective amnesia. I can't quite shake the specter of the forgotten past that haunts one of our nation's most vibrant cities. A literal earthen wall was built by the forced labor of slaves in order to protect white colonial inhabitants from indigenous populations and rival white colonists. This is how Wall Street got its name. In addition, the four hundred graves of slaves that were unearthed revealed that the institution of slavery was just as brutal in New York as it was in Charleston. Many of the remains reveal lives of excruciating hard labor. Also, many of the graves are of children. Further, the forced labor of slaves helped to make New York the internationally important city that it became, as well as the critical financial partner for the building of the institution of slavery in America, and the building of enormous wealth in both the United States and Europe. As we approach the sesquicentennial, are we to remember this part of our history, or will we be confined to the years 1861-1865? Four millions slaves did not just appear in the South. They were kidnapped and brutalized by Americans from both the South and the North, and by Europeans, and then forcibly brought to America. It seems that to fully understand our history, that this part of the history must be dealt with as well, as we consider the national tragedy that slavery–and the Civil War that was fought to finally end it–represent.

I hope we do remember, since the present is indeed influenced by our memory of the past. Some of the changes that current politicians are attempting to bring about deal directly with the legacies of the past, and specifically with the legacy of the distribution of wealth in our nation. That cannot be clear to the white population, however, unless the white population understands how we got to this point. The majority of African American men and women and indigenous men and women have a standard of living that is so far below that of white men and women, that most white men and women cannot fully comprehend the scope of the disparity. As we prepare for Thanksgiving, in many African American communities across the nation, and in indigenous reserves in Canada and reservations in the United States, children are freezing to death and starving. That's right. Children are starving–some of them relatives of a close friend of mine.. These facts are direct results of past actions of both nations. Just because the US elected our first African American President, those facts have not changed. The point is not to assign blame or guilt, but to fix the problem.

I don't even know how to respond to a claim that slavery in the South wasn't as brutal as overwhelming evidence to the contrary conclusively proves that it was. From all that I continue to read, slavery was brutal wherever it was instituted, except, perhaps, in the homes of free black men and women who saved family members when they were presented with the rare opportunity to do so.