Last October, a reader named Bob came across one of my blog posts about an auction of Nazi paraphernalia. In the post, I was pretty adamant about not-never-ever having any inclination to buy such artifacts.
Like Klan paraphernalia, they were inherently evil, I said, and I could not imagine having them in my home. I wondered why anyone would want to collect the stuff.
In the post, I acknowledged that some black people collect the awful images that others had prescribed to us. I don’t collect it but I don’t begrudge people who do – whether it’s Nazi, Klan, Confederate or what some call Black Americana pieces. My post even mentioned that there were Jews who collected Nazi paraphernalia.
Bob was apoplectic about the post, but not about my comments regarding Nazi artifacts. He ranted about why the Civil War was fought. Never mind that I never mentioned slavery and the Civil War. I only mentioned that some Civil War letters, prints and awards were auctioned that day, but that had nothing to do with the why of the war itself.
I got to thinking about Bob yesterday while reading a commentary in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how some folks have tried to rewrite the reason behind the war. They say it was fought over “states rights” and not over the freedom of my black ancestors, among other reasons. The writer of the newspaper article – titled “Losers have written the Civil War’s history” – did a good job of dispelling that myth.
Bob crudely (I could feel the hatred in his heart and head as he wrote) accused me of getting my American history wrong. The war was not fought to free the slaves, he said, it was fought because the “North was making unfair demands on the South.” Heck, he said, many black people fought on the side of the southern slave-holding states (I added the word “slave-holding”). He forgot to mention that many more left the plantations to fight on the Union side (after President Lincoln laid out the challenge in the Emancipation Proclamation and Frederick Douglass encouraged them to join).
Then he accused us “ignorant Northerners” of not knowing what we were talking about. I’m actually from the South, born and bred in Georgia, still have family and roots there. I suspect that there are some Southerners like myself who also know that the abolition of slavery was the primary aim of the war.
I ignored the man’s comments and refused to post them.
Then he wrote to ask why I didn’t post them. And then he insulted me again. Was he nuts? For one thing, I wasn’t going to let him use my blog to rewrite history. Let him get his own blog; that’s why I started mine so I didn’t have to read garbage like his. A century ago, no one in my family could do that. Now, I can.
This is the 150th anniversary of the war, and there will be celebrations all over. Several years ago, a friend and I visited Gettysburg, Antietam and several other Civil War battlegrounds. It was one of the most fascinating and amazing journeys – both physically and historically – I had ever taken. At Gettysburg, we had our own private tour guide who rode in the car with us and gave us a history lesson that made the war, its purpose and its human losses real.
Meanwhile, I plan to be on the lookout for war-related artifacts on the auction tables, and as usual, I’ll be digging up the history behind them. Because this my history, too – the true version, though.
