Secession, 150 Years Later
Gov. McDonnell’s Civil War proclamation is an appropriate recollection of a past that should be remembered, but not revived.
Gov. George Allen’s racially fraught Confederate History and Heritage Month gave way to Gov. Jim Gilmore’s “Remembrance of the Sacrifices and Honor of All Virginians Who Served in the Civil War.”
Which gave way, in the Mark Warner and Tim Kaine administrations, to no acknowledgment at all that April is a particularly significant month in the history of Virginia. It is.
In April 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union; in April 1865, the Confederacy it had joined was vanquished with the South’s surrender at Appomattox.
In this sesquicentennial of the start of America’s most tragic war, Gov. Bob McDonnell has proclaimed April Civil War History in Virginia Month in a document of such diplomatic delicacy that no one — neither descendants of slaves nor of Confederates — has, of yet, denounced it.
A singular feat by a governor who last year fecklessly rubber-stamped a Confederate History Month proclamation that sent him stumbling into a bitter controversy over slavery and the true meaning of the South’s “Lost Cause.”
McDonnell learned his lesson, and did this year what he intended last: to focus attention on Virginia’s historic role in the seminal event that defined the United States as we know it today.
And to do so mainly to boost the state’s tourism industry, taking great care to touch all the right rhetorical buttons along the way.
The governor proclaims: “from 2011-2015 a diverse and growing commonwealth will host innumerable public events, lectures, re-enactments, seminars, and remembrances covering every aspect of the war, and no state is more closely connected to this pivotal period of American history, and therefore no state is better suited to host visitors seeking to learn about the Civil War, the Confederacy, slavery, emancipation and the full history of our United States, and for that reason Virginia encourages visitors from across the country and the world to visit the Commonwealth during this period.”
Such bald marketing is a bit jarring amid all of the allusions to an American epoch of such horror and suffering and misplaced ideals.
It is a perfectly good purpose, though — particularly given the times, when so many are feeling the effects of a poor economy.
McDonnell ends his pitch by urging all Virginians to participate in commemorating this 150th anniversary “as we strive to enact the vision laid out in the preamble to the United States Constitution of a ‘more perfect union.’”
The tension between federalists and states’-righters that lingers to this day reminds how wide the political divide remains. The sesquicentennial can profit Virginians most as a reminder, if any is needed, of the folly of a nation taking up arms against itself.
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