Today, The New York Times' Disunion blog, which is commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War by tracking the war, one day at a time, takes a pair of January 1861 pranks between Southern and Northern students at Yale to make this point:
Propagandists and politicians in both parts of the country liked to say (as do some of their latter-day successors) that a deep cultural chasm separated North from South. “We are not one people,” wrote the New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley as early as 1855. “We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery.” Yet in fact, the Mason-Dixon Line was far from being an impassable barrier, especially for members of America’s elites.
That last clause is important: Think of West Point, whose alumni filled the Union and Confederate officer rolls alike. The aristocracy of the "Old South" may have had its own code of values, but it shared certain markers of social status with the North. Vanderbilt, the "Harvard of the South," wasn't founded until 1873 -- during the antebellum era, the "Harvard of the South" was, well, Harvard.
This should be a reminder -- as if any were necessary -- of just how pathetic the fetishization of the "Lost Cause" on Southern college campuses really is. When fraternities like Kappa Alpha celebrate "Old South Week," they're pretending to be the heirs of centuries of continuous Southern aristocratic tradition; in reality, they're honoring "founders" they never had at schools no "Old Southern" aristocrat ever attended. But it should also cause students at Yale (my alma mater) and similar colleges to look past their schools' contemporary "liberal elite" stereotype to their tangled and often culpable histories. Yale administrators may debate the display of a portrait of John C. Calhoun, but students don't think twice about living in a dorm named after him -- the Confederacy isn't sanitized, but it's often ignored.
The fact that there arguably aren't any social institutions (elite or otherwise) that are as genuinely national as West Point and Yale once were makes it much more unlikely that the sesquicentennial will spark tough discussions between those who draw their heritage from each side of the war. But projects like the Disunion blog, by de-archiving the Civil War and illustrating that "the past isn't dead, it isn't even past," should at least serve to educate and unsettle those of us (and I include myself in this) who align ourselves with "the right side of history" but haven't thought enough about what that history is.
-- Dara Lind
