Remembrance!
Remembrance of What?
On September 19, 1895, a huge crowd of over 40,000 people Tgathered on Snodgrass Hill to celebrate the dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Lew Wallace, one of the guest speakers that day, proclaimed … "Remembrance! Remembrance of what? Not the cause, but the heroism it invoked."
To most in attendance, the creation of this country's first battlefield park was a symbol of reunification. Civil War veterans from both North and South had helped created the park, established five years earlier. The onetime combatants had found common ground in the idea of memorializing the notions of "bravery" and "courage" as they pertained to the men who fought in the battle. Deeper social issues, such as the causes of the war, went largely unaddressed during the grand event.
Among the many speakers that day, however, Alabama Governor W.C. Oates actually broached the topic of slavery, which he termed "the Pandora's box of American politics." Oates, a Confederate officer who had fought at Chickamauga, told his fellow Southerners to "stand proud, for they fought for a just cause, which though lost, was partially won." He continued "the Negroes simply passed through the fiery furnace of slavery to reach civilization, which was the only road by which they could have obtained it."
Oates's "just cause partially won" meant that although four million blacks had been freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War, most of them in 1895 still lived lives that were restricted by racial prejudice, limited economic opportunity, and legal discrimination.
On that very same day, Booker T. Washington spoke to a mixed black and white audience in Atlanta, Georgia. He urged blacks to stop fighting segregation and second-class citizenship and concentrate on learning useful skills. "Dignify and glorify common labor. There is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
Washington asked whites to help the Negroes in their efforts to advance themselves. If they did, he promised they would be "surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has ever seen." Washington dreamed that racial reconciliation could be forged in mutual economic progress. The speech that Washington delivered that day became known as the Atlanta Compromise and is perhaps the most important sectional reconciliation speech ever delivered.
These simultaneous events show that thirty years after the War had ended, the nation was still divided on how its people addressed the social issues surrounding the Civil War. Many Americans were still far from obtaining the economic, political, or social equality that the rebirth of this nation had promised. They had taken just one small step along a path that their descendants are still traveling today.
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