Anthony Conwright claims doing so leads to ongoing racism and the erosion of democracy itself.
Anthony Conwright argues in the New York Times that the Civil War should not be called by that name because it never was so called during its fighting.
Conwright is angry that back on the anniversary of Appomattox, President Trump marked the event by quoting Ulysses S Grant’s magnanimous statement that the “rebels are our countrymen again.” Never mind that Grant was carrying out Lincoln’s explicit policy of magnanimity toward the rebels as a means of reuniting the country (“with malice toward none, with charity for all” and all that).
Even more ridiculously, Conwright argues that calling the conflagration the “Civil War” somehow diminishes the evil of slavery abolished after the North’s victory. From “It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War:’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion“:
As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?
Of course, during its fighting, the Civil War wasn’t called that with capital letters because it was still being fought. But it was certainly acknowledged to be a civil war. For example, here is how Lincoln described the conflict in the Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
Lincoln’s accurate use of the term civil war in what is perhaps the greatest speech in United States history hardly obscured the principles that were at stake nor absolved the slaveocracy from the many evils they had perpetrated.
Never mind Lincoln. Conwright hyperbolically claims that calling the Civil War the “Civil War” leads to ongoing racism and the erosion of democracy itself:
American society’s use of Civil War to rhetorically veil the slaveholders’ rebellion has consequences. After the redemption of the Confederacy, ex-Confederates and their heirs helped create a regime of anti-Black violence by instituting a legal architecture of disenfranchisement and lynching. That is what makes confronting how we refer to the Civil War a civic imperative. The danger of rhetorical abstraction lies not only in its distortion of the past, but also in its pre-emptive justification for future assaults on democratic life.
More:
The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.
Please. The name Civil War does nothing to obscure the evil of slavery against which the North fought (eventually, although not at first), nor the tragedy of Reconstruction’s collapse. Besides, calling it the Slaveholder’s Rebellion would actually minimize the enormous stakes of the war, making it seem more akin to the historical blip of the Whiskey Rebellion than the most consequential event in American history after the Revolution.
Conwright is furious about Trump’s January 6 pardons. I understand that. But comparing January 6 to the Civil War is ridiculous. That bloody contest was about far more than slavery. Rather, it determined the ultimate nature of our union going forward. As Ken Burns stated (quoting historian Shelby Foote) in his great documentary (which he properly called The Civil War), before the war Americans spoke of “the United States are.” After the Civil War, we now speak of “the United States is.”
I don’t quite understand why the New York Times‘ opinion editors chose to publish this particular column at this particular time. I suspect they seek to further the 1619 Project’s odious historical revisionism that everything about the United States is steeped in racism and to stoke January 6 hysteria.
If so, the column failed. The name Civil War strikes deep chords in American memory. The comparatively puny historical consequence of January 6 does not belong in the same discussion.