As measured in terms of both loss of life and physical destruction, the U.S. Civil War was by far the most devastating ever prosecuted by the United States. More Americans died in that war than died in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – combined. The total number of dead and wounded on all sides ran to over a million, and much of the armature of civilization in the American South was converted into smoldering ruins. Richmond, Va. in 1865 looked as devastated as Berlin did 80 years later, which is sobering considering Richmond happened before the mass production of armaments, and indiscriminate use of air power, that marked the later war.
General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah late in the war was, by design, an act of almost unparalleled fury. Sherman’s army numbered about 60,000 men, and in their 300 mile march they obliterated everything in their path – burning crops and plantation houses, destroying telegraph wires, tearing up railroad tracks, and levelling warehouses and factories.
The casus belli of the Civil War was slavery, which has been described metaphorically– and in my opinion aptly– as America’s “original sin.” It badly tainted the founding of the country, lending a poignant dissonance to the very founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, which held that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It has occurred to me before that– to continue the metaphor of original sin– that the “sin” was not really slavery, per se, though chattel slavery was certainly the most appalling expression of the deeper sin, which was the idea that non-Europeans were destined only for conquest and subjugation. Thus the “original sin” was really white privilege, and the struggle to repent of this sin did not end with Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, because the end of the Civil War did not end the subtler, but in much more pervasive, other structures of white privilege in American society.
The struggle for full rights for the descendants of slaves since then has been both long and difficult, and despite the absence of war has resulted in thousands of deaths.
According to Wikipedia:
“From 1885 to 1908, southern states passed new constitutions and electoral rules to disenfranchise most blacks and many poor whites, ending election violence by utterly excluding them from politics. The dominant whites enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to enforce blacks’ second-class status. During this period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lynchings reached a peak, reflecting the social repression and economic hard times. Florida led the nation in lynchings per capita from 1900-1930. Georgia led the nation in lynchings from 1900-1931 with 302 incidents, according to The Tuskegee Institute. Lynchings peaked in many areas when it was time for landowners to settle accounts with sharecroppers.
“The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968, with the annual peak occurring in the 1890s, at a time of economic stress in the South and political suppression of blacks. A five-year study published in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative found that nearly 3,959 black men, women, and children were lynched in the twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950.”
In his second inaugural address, given shortly before the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln concluded with his vision of the United States after the war:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
“Finish(ing) the work we are in” has been a continuing project from that day in March of 1865 to the present. A pessimist might ask why it has taken so long to accomplish what we have in terms of racial justice, and why there is still so much work to do, and might use as evidence the racist and nativist character of a significant fraction of Donald Trump’s supporters.
There is something to this, but I think it is possible to look at the long sweep of post-bellum history and be inspired by the persistent nature of the struggle for racial justice. We are still a fair distance from the goal of racial harmony, but we have also come an immense distance, and that ought to be a source of strength and determination for the journey ahead.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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