Uriah

1. Not sure if I'll write this up, but I've been re-reading Lincoln's Second Inaugural while thinking about the Confederate statuary.

2. Lincoln's address is a remarkable exercise in attempting national reconciliation by assuming a collective American guilt for slavery.

3. It includes particular and sharp criticisms of the South, but they're joined to an assumption that war is God's judgment on all the USA.

4. This is very different from Lost Cause mythos. But it points to a way of remembering Civil War that isn't just CSA=proto-Nazi traitors.

5. Lincoln is hinting, I think, at a way that many non-Confederate-nostalgist Civil War buffs think about the war today ...

6. ... as an (incomplete) expiation in which white Americans know that depending on their birthplace they might have fought on either side.

7. This is mythmaking, of course, but also not without truth: South didn't invent slavery, Founders accepted it, North tolerated it, etc ...