[In honors of Veterans Day, a
series AmericanStudying veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to a
crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—share your own
stories and connections, please!]
On one of the
terrible, and then one of the great, American moments.
As part of my
2013 Veterans Days series, I wrote about the frustrating contradiction embodied
by African American World War I soldiers—the way in which their impressive collective service
gave way to continued discrimination and mistreatment once they were back
stateside. Those negative responses were made possible, or at least greatly
enabled, by the nation’s ability to forget the soldiers’ service, to write this
hugely inspiring history right out of our communal memories (despite the best
efforts of writers and leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois). And it’s important to note that such post-war communal
forgetting and elision had happened before, and in an even more overtly ironic
way: the forgetting and elision of the histories and stories of the more than
180,000 African Americans who served as U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War.
Given all the
challenges faced by those African American Civil War soldiers, given Abraham Lincoln’s clear crediting of them with helping
turn the tide of the war, and given the
freakin’ overarching cause of the war itself, our immediate and widespread
forgetting and elision of this community of veterans was and remains a national
disgrace and shame. And while those processes unfolded over many years, they
also can be localized in one specific and very telling moment: the May 23-24, 1865 Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C., in which over two hundred thousand
Union veterans marched from the Capitol to the White House—and for which not a
single USCT soldier was invited or allowed to participate. It’s impossible to
know whether Abraham Lincoln, had he lived, would have permitted the Grand
Review to develop in that way; but it’s certainly fair to link the moment and
exclusion directly to the immediate post-war changes in Reconstruction plans
and goals enacted by the Andrew Johnson administration and much of the rest of the federal government.
If the Grand Review was thus a low moment in American history, it also led,
six months later, to one of our high points: Harrisburg’s Grand Review of Black Troops. On November 14, 1865, Harrisburg’s own Thomas Morris Chester—Civil War journalist, recruiter, and leader; son of an escaped slave who
would go on to study law and become an educational leader and much more; one of
America’s most inspiring figures by any measure—served as grand marshal for a
parade of U.S. Colored Troops, who marched through the city to the home of
former secretary of war Simon Cameron (who reviewed and thanked the troops). Speeches by Octavius Catto, William Howard Day, and other luminaries helped frame the moment’s true historical, social,
and national significance. And significant it was and remains: while it’s vital
to remember, and rage against, the way in which the African American soldiers
and veterans were forgotten and elided in our collective memories, then and (to
at least too great of an extent) now, it’s just as important to remember the
kinds of inspiring alternative histories and communities represented by great
moments like Harrisburg’s Grand Review.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Stories or histories you’d share for the weekend post?
No comments:
Post a Comment