Divided by a Common Past

A hundred years removed from the end of the Civil War, political scientist D. W. Brogan observed that

the country that has a “history,” dramatic, moving, and tragic, has to live with it—with the problems it raised but did not solve, with the emotions that it leaves as a damaging legacy, with the defective vision that preoccupation with the heroic, with the disastrous, with the expensive past fosters. ¹

The Civil War and Reconstruction era was certainly America’s central drama—part tragedy, part romance, without a trace of comedy. In the first acts, the Founders established a free nation on compromised principles, then they seemed powerless to stop the cords of union from snapping one by one. The story climaxed in a fratricidal conflict that cost more lives than the sum total of all Americans killed in every war from the Revolution to the present, then continued to unfold beyond a “new birth of freedom” into an uncertain yet truly revolutionary postbellum world. However, the final act—the dénouement and resolution—remains unfinished and contested. Like many observers before and after him, Brogan recognized this at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1965. Memories of the Civil War, the legacies of Reconstruction, and constructions of race have remained divisive issues over the past century and a half.