[Following up
Monday’s Memorial Day special, a series on some of the complex American
histories connected to the holiday’s original identity as Decoration Day.]
On one of the
great American speeches, and why it’d be so important to add to our collective
memories.
In a long-ago
guest post on Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s Atlantic blog, Civil War
historian Andy Hall highlighted
Frederick Douglass’s amazing 1871 Decoration Day speech (full text available at
that first hyperlink). Delivered at Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery,
then as now the single largest resting place of U.S. soldiers, Douglass’s short
but incredibly (if
not surprisingly) eloquent and pointed speech has to be ranked as one of
the most impressive in American history. I’m going to end this first paragraph
here so you can read the speech in full (again, it’s at the first hyperlink
above), and I’ll see you in a few.
Welcome back! If
I were to close-read Douglass’s speech, I could find choices worth extended
attention in every paragraph and every line. But I agree with Hall’s final
point, that the start of Douglass’s concluding paragraph—“But we are not here
to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We
must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic”—is
particularly noteworthy and striking. Granted, this was not yet the era that
would come to be dominated by narratives of reunion and reconciliation between
the regions, and then by ones of conversation to the Southern perspective (on
all of which, see tomorrow’s post); an era in which Douglass’s ideas would be
no less true, nor in which (I believe) he would have hesitated to share them,
but in which a Decoration Day organizing committee might well have chosen not
to invite a speaker who would articulate such a clear and convincing take on
the causes and meanings of the Civil War. Yet even in 1871, to put that
position so bluntly and powerfully at such an occasion would have been
impressive for even a white speaker, much less an African American one.
If we were to
better remember Douglass’s Decoration Day speech, that would be one overt and
important effect: to push back on so many of the narratives of the Civil War
that have developed in the subsequent century and a half. One of the most
frequent such narratives is that there was bravery and sacrifice on both sides,
as if to produce a leveling effect on our perspective on the war—but as
Douglass notes in the paragraph before that conclusion, recognizing individual
bravery in combat is not at all the same as remembering a war: “The essence and
significance of our devotions here today are not to be found in the fact that
the men whose remains fill these graves were brave in battle.” I believe
Douglass here can be connected to Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address, and its own concluding notion of honoring the dead
through completing “the unfinished work”: “It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” That work and task remained
unfinished and great long after the Civil War’s end, after all—and indeed remain
so to this day in many ways. Just another reason to better remember Frederick
Douglass’s Decoration Day speech.
Next Decoration
Day history tomorrow,
BenI
PS. What do you
think?
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