I've been following the New York Times's admirable series on the Civil War, harking back to events of 150 years ago. Recently I also began to read Adam Phillips's wonderful quasi-biography of Sigmund Freud, which begins with this quote from Freud: “. . . these psychoanalytical matters are intelligible only if presented in pretty full and complete detail, just as an analysis really gets going only when the patient descends to minute details from the abstractions which are their surrogate.”1 This quote certainly explains the attraction of the Disunion series2 in the Times. We all learn the basic outline of the Civil War in school, but not always the kind of details from particular soldiers and about particular battles that we get in Disunion.
We all learn that the Civil War was fought to preserve the Union, to achieve equality among its peoples, to achieve the abolition of slavery, to secure states rights—and these are all abstract ideas, even ideals, that drove the soldiers through the war. But after reading the Freud quote, I began to think about how the North and the South used these abstract ideas differently. Most Northerners fought for (along with preserving the union) ideals that in many ways did not benefit themselves, but other people. Thus, they were not hiding behind ideals but seeking to root them in the reality of people in need. Undoubtedly, many Northerners were racists, but many also set up underground railroads to help slaves escape from the South into the North, despite the fact that many of those slaves would one day be competing with the Northerners economically. The Union army also harbored escaped slaves and helped them to freedom, even though this action sometimes reduced the resources available to the soldiers themselves. In other words, the Northerners joined ideals to concrete reality, a metaphorical way of being in the world.
The Southerners wanted to preserve slavery, under the guise of states' rights. Certainly slavery was an institution very beneficial to their economy. Also, many Southerners seemed to accept that the black people who were their slaves were subhuman, an inferior race that needed guidance from whites to know how to handle themselves in the world. Some Southerners thought of their slaves as children, whom they were protecting and nurturing. But they also, of course, often treated their slaves like animals, or worse—certainly not as equal human beings. So, white Southerners fought against a federal government that would tell them how to think, how to live, especially in regards to their treatment of slaves.
Where Northerners held ideals of abolition and equality, they also saw the Southern black slaves as people (“created equal”), who had the right to determine the courses of their own lives. Southerners, largely out of self-interest, saw their slaves as not being capable of equality or freedom; thus they could justify slavery and treat these people like property. Where the Northerners were able to root their ideals in the wellbeing of actual people, the Southerners neglected and abused actual beings in order to uphold their ideas. Here's another way to see it: the Northerners were able to think and act metaphorically, while the Southerners upheld ideas without rooting them in reality. Can an idea like states' rights be an ideal when it involves the sufferings of others? The South never honestly linked their abstract ideas to reality—such abuses as separating families and rape were overlooked in the effort of Southerners to see themselves as benefactors of their slaves. Many white Southerners never sought to benefit anyone other than themselves via their participation in the Civil War. Most white Northerners pursued an ideal and acted on it for the benefit of people other than themselves.
So, I guess you could say that the metaphorical way of thinking (joining ideals to reality) won the Civil War, but the South's desire to hide behind abstract ideas that deny reality is still a great threat to equality and democracy today—not just in the South, but anywhere people embrace abstract ideas that benefit themselves but also cause the sufferings of others.
1Adam
Phillips, Becoming Freud (New Haven: Yale UP, 2014). The
quote is from the book's epigram, taken from a letter from Freud to
Oscar Pfister, 5 June 1910.
2The
Disunion series is easily found at NYTimes.com or on Facebook. I
will not cite particular essays in the series, but the instances of
actions by Northerners and Southerners that I cite in this post can
be found in the series.
