An Outsider's View of the Civil War

by Michael Bouman

I grew up in Yankee country, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, with no sense of personal connection to the Civil War.  It was the Revolutionary War that seemed vivid to me, because I lived near Trenton and learned about the astonishing capture of that city by George Washington.  Of course, I had no idea that it was not really a 'city' at the time.  I imagined him taking quite a large metropolis with his ragged band of soldiers. 

My family frequented Washington Crossing State Park on the Pennsylvania side.  My dad had done his architectural apprenticeship near the lookout point atop Bowman's Hill, just a short cannon shot from the site of the crossing.  Every Christmas during my youth a local actor named St. John Terrell would dress up as Washington and lead a handful of reenactors across the Delaware River.  I looked him up on Google a few minutes ago.

In my family tree, only one root was present in the U.S. in the Civil War Era.  He was a veterinarian in central New Jersey and he was not in the war.  The other three roots came from Ireland and Germany during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant.  My family passed down no memories of the Civil War.  It was as if it happened to someone else, and we were spectators.

I went to high school near Washington's Crossing.  The superintendent of my school district had done his Ph.D. in history about the Battle of Gettysburg.  It seemed that a good number of my history teachers were doing Civil War research.  Naturally, my schooling taught me only the barest outline of that war, that the issue was whether states had the right to approve or nullify national laws and whether they had a corresponding right to disconnect from "The United States." Slavery was also part of my education of what the war was about.

This was not an indoctrination in which the South was demonized. I don't remember any sense of urgency about who was right and wrong.  Nothing vivid, important, or memorable was conveyed, as far as I can recall.  The same was true about every other war we surveyed.  When my 8th grade English teacher read part of John Hersey's Hiroshima to our class, we got our first and only exposure to the idea that wars involved horrors.  Until just now I had not realized how completely sanitized my schooling was.  I didn't see Gettysburg or study the Civil War seriously until I was middle-aged.  James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom was my entry to the many stories of what seemed to be "someone else’s war." 

My twelve years in Missouri have acquainted me with a great many people for whom the topic of the Civil War is a springboard to intense feelings about family heritage, the sense of honor, the wounds of horrors and of injustices of many kinds.  There are many organizations in Missouri whose membership is restricted to descendants of The Mayflower, or the American Revolution, or both sides of the Civil War.  There are Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy and the Union, reenactors aplenty, and impressive numbers of people who carry forward in a personal way the sufferings of their great-grandparents.  For many people the Confederate flag is a symbol of present-day injustice, though these people are polarized in their views of the nature of the injustice.  This polarity of sentiments and the complicated meanings that tie past with present are part of the troubled water of today’s Missouri. 

Indeed, the water can seem so dangerous that if feels like a monumental challenge to invite Missouri institutions to find inclusive ways of interpreting the Civil War Era.  It's a social mine field to attempt such a thing.  In some places, an inclusive interpretation would necessarily acknowledge that there is more than one version of "the story of the war in our town."  There may be stories of what the majority did, the resourceful, ingenious things that averted the worst that might have happened to that majority.  But there are also stories of the minorities in the social fabric; the ones who sympathized with the other side, or the ones who were recent immigrants, or the ones who were enslaved at the time. 

Accomplishing inclusive interpretation in this highly volatile topic of our Civil War will entail some learning about how to extend the arts of common civility to the areas of uncommon tension.  When viewed in this way, it seems to me that the potential social benefits are worth all the risks.  As I have learned time and time again in voluntary associations, the most important skill we bring to association is our knowledge of making and keeping a friend.