Gettysburg National Battlefield Still Has Lessons to Teach

I am a history nerd of the highest order. That puts visiting historical sites high on my list of vacation options. Recently, I toured the Gettysburg National Military Park that commemorates the Battle of Gettysburg, 154 years ago. The national battlefield where the South’s invasion of the North ended and the spiral to the end began — — is large — about 10 square miles — and covered with monuments to every Federal state, army, corp, division, and regiment that fought there. There are also monuments to the Confederate soldiers. The view across the valley looks like a graveyard writ large — which it is. 50,000 Men died there, for their own reasons.

Those reasons. Yeah, the Civil War remains its own battlefield for Black folks, let alone the rest of the population. The whole “Slavery was the Cause of the Civil War” conversation, a pendulum continually swinging, has always seemed too easy, too self-congratulatory on the part of white liberals. I’ve been Black my whole life, so it is hard for me to believe that any collection of white men willingly risked their lives to liberate my ancestors from anything. Whites then, as now, had their own, let’s call them in the language of modern political excuses, “economic anxieties” wrapped up with a racial animus so strong and bizarre as to be used to justify colonial systems that are still churning today. Slavery didn’t cause the Civil War, no one thing could have caused and sustained something so devastating. Standing on Cemetery Hill,…