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March 14, 2011

Loraine Anderson: Civil War a mirror

By LORAINE ANDERSON Local columnist

"Four score and seven years ago …"

I think about this phrase on an early Saturday morning while I work on a story about the Civil War.

I've been rereading sections of "Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood" by Civil War historian Bruce Catton. It's his 1972 memoir of growing up in Benzonia during the early 1900s when many Civil War veterans were still alive.

" ... our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation ..."

I see a 12-year-old version of myself as I page through the memoir, copying Abraham Lincoln's 266-word Gettysburg Address from a World Book Encyclopedia. It is 1961.The Civil War centennial is beginning — at the same time anti-segregation "freedom rides" and civil rights marches are starting in the South.

"... conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal ..."

Everyone in my sixth-grade class has to memorize Lincoln's speech and recite it before the whole class. Mrs. Blackmore sits at the back, grading us. She cannot see the boy in the front row lining up his collection of Union and Confederate soldiers for skirmishes during our recitations.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war ..."

To look down at the boy's desk while orating is to burst out laughing. Mrs. Blackmore goes on a scouting mission. The soldiers are taken prisoner.

" ... testing whether that nation or any nation ... can long endure."

Lincoln's words moved me then and and move me now.

The Civil War was a defining moment in American history. It preserved the Union. It ended slavery.

It was an important fork in our road to nationhood and resolve for democracy.

It helped create a body of law to safeguard democracy, to deinstitutionalize discrimination based on race, gender and religion and to ensure equal opportunity.

It is a national mirror pulled out every half-century that shows where we've been and where we are.

The Civil War did not resolve ugly issues that started 392 years ago when the first 20 African slaves were brought to the American Colonies, but it opened the way to start dealing with discrimination and socio-political inequities.

The path to freedom is a long road.

The Civil War sesquicentennial starts next month.

It's an important celebration, if we remember how complex the causes, how brutal the war and how big the sacrifices.

Lincoln's last 44 words are for me the most important today:

"... that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com or 933-1468.

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