An Encounter with the Past

I've read Frederick Douglass' first autobiography and am reading the second, an expansion of the first. I recalled the experience below today as I was reading.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Frederick Douglass

First Parish Church, Brunswick, Maine

About 20+ years ago when my family and I were in Maine I had the opportunity to go to an all day meeting for clergy at First Parish Church in Brunswick, Maine, where Bowdoin College is. The meetinghouse of First Parish dates from 1845. During a break the associate  pastor asked if anyone wanted a tour of the sanctuary, and many of us took her up on the offer. We all sat in the pews as she talked about the sanctuary. She was in the pulpit, and described how Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and orator, had spoken at the same pulpit, as well as General Grant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read one of his poems from the pulpit. You get the idea.

She then talked about some of the famous parishioners there, and mentioned Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her husband, Calvin Stowe, was a professor at Bowdoin. She then said that it was during a worship service in the church that she had the vision that

inspired her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which enlightened Northerners about the evils of slavery. She pointed in my general direction and said that in the pew where she was sitting there was a plaque commemorating the occasion. I looked down and saw the plaque. Ok, that made my year.





I have always been fascinated by historical places--places where important events happened. Not just the site of where something happened. Places like the above. As in, "Harriet Beecher Stowe sat in the exact place you're sitting, on the same pew, where she had this vision."

Historic buildings have a great appeal. A good example is the Old State House in Boston, famous of course for its connection to activities leading up to the American Revolution. And outside the front door is a circle of brick in the square that is the site of the Boston Massacre. The guards were posted right outside that building. 

It always saddens me when historic places are demolished to make way for a shopping mall or something else. When they are gone they are gone, never to return. They are sometimes our only physical link with events of the past that continue to shape our present and will shape our future.

We Need to Reconcile With the Past. Now.

George H. Lewis, 1830-1863

Here in the comfort of my Connecticut home I have again been contemplating the Civil War. It’s personal for me. My family has a very long memory. Not long enough in some respects, but long.

First off, I need to say that the turmoil of the protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police are of no surprise for me. We’re still fighting the Civil War and we still live with the implications of two and a half centuries of slavery.

Racism is the legacy of slavery. It is the perpetuation of a brutal system that kept generations of Africans and African Americans in bondage. Racism is not just prejudice. It is prejudice empowered.

Here’s my history with the war and what led up to it. My great great grandfather, George Hallam Lewis, died on February 11, 1863 of chronic diarrhea at the Eckington Hospital on the outskirts of Washington, DC, very close to the present National Arboretum. He enlisted in August, 1862 in the 15th Connecticut Regiment, Company F. They were dispatched to Washington where they guarded the bridges that led across the Potomac into Virginia, a very important assignment. Lincoln was terrified at the proximity of the capital to Confederate territory.

George left behind his wife and four small children, one of them my great grandfather, Samuel Clinton Lewis. He never saw them again.

George was good with horses. He lived on a farm in West Meriden, Connecticut. He was assigned to the Ambulance Corps which had just been formed. His unit gradually worked their way south in the fall of 1862 and eventually arrived in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Any Civil War buff knows about the Battle of Fredericksburg, in December. General Burnside ordered wave after wave of regiments up the hill toward Marye’s Heights to take the Confederate stronghold but did not succeed. That night many Union soldiers, wounded and not, spent the night on the field before Marye’s Heights with the Northern Lights overhead. The head of the Medical corps later recorded that Confederate sharpshooters aimed at Union ambulance workers trying to retrieve the wounded from the battlefield.

I don’t think George was there although he might have been. He had had problems with persistent diarrhea for awhile, probably either dysentery or cholera, both of which ripped through both sides with ferocity.

In January, after the Union army had been encamped in Falmouth, across the river from Fredericksburg, General Burnside decided he would try to take the city by going down the east bank of the river and crossing further south. It was an especially bad winter for mud, and the army succumbed to the famous Mud March. Many soldiers, made ill by the horrible conditions, died of pneumonia and other illnesses. George was one of them. Although he survived the Mud March it wasn’t by much. He was taken to the hospital on February 10 and died the next day.

This is a lot. But there’s more.

My great great grandmother, Elizabeth Hotchkiss Lewis, was at home with her children. She received word of George’s death through his uncle, Isaac C. Lewis.

Elizabeth’s brother Seth was down in the South. He had gone down for business reasons and stayed. He fought in the Confederate army until he was captured and spent time in prison. I’m not sure where. He is one person I need to research more. I know this, however. After the war was over he stayed for awhile with his sister Elizabeth in Meriden. Hm.

I have no ancestors (direct) who fought in the Confederate army. My wife does, however. She didn’t know that until recently.

Slavery? Yep. Both of us are in its legacy right up to our belt buckles. Anita’s last name is Hawkins. Her ancestor Admiral John Hawkins was one of the commanders of the navy that defeated the Spanish Armada, and who, in several expeditions to the Caribbean, established the British transatlantic slave trade. Guess what? I’m descended from him too.

Both of us have ancestors who owned plantations in the south and who held slaves. I have ancestors in New England who owned slaves. Damn it, our 1794 house was occupied by a family in 1820 who enslaved a young girl under the age of 14.

There are several points here.

FIrst, the issue of slavery is complex beyond anyone’s imagination. We all share in its legacy. Nobody is free of it.

Second, the Civil War is the period in which Americans were the most deeply divided. It undergirds the deep divisions facing us now.

Third, because the Civil War was fought between two regions of our country, both of which still remain a part of the United States, we need to find a way to reconcile the legacy of the South with today’s reality. If we don’t the divisions will continue.

The South conjured up the “Lost Cause” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a pseudo-nostalgic way of dealing with the loss of the war and the end of slavery. Many of the statues of Robert E. Lee and others were erected in the early 20th century as a reminder. Here’s the tricky part. How does a large portion of our nation divorce itself from the legacy of a lost war? We can’t erase it, although I would argue that statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and others belong in private statuary gardens and not in the medians of major thoroughfares in the South. The presence of these monuments in public spaces imposes a narrative on the whole of society that is unreasonable at best and is psychologically damaging at worst.

Those who still look at the war with nostalgia are living in a fool's paradise. Let's be honest. Yes, it was a conflict between two societies, one primarily agrarian (the South) and one much more heavily industrialized (the North). Yes, it was a constitutional crisis about how much control individual states have over their own internal affairs. But make no mistake. The Confederacy was founded on the principle that “its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition," said Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in 1861.  The war was about slavery, a political system that made it possible, and the political failure to end slavery without resorting to war. That political failure started a slow burn in 1789 when the writers of the Constitution did not outright abolish slavery and instead protected it while doing to enslaved Africans exactly what they fought the Revolution over--no representation, counting them as part of the population for purposes of assigning congressional seats (the notorious 3/5 compromise courtesy of a Connecticut native, Roger Sherman), yet denying them citizenship and the basic rights thereof. There was nothing noble or glorious or romantic about slavery or the Civil War. Over 600,000 Americans died in that war. Nobody knows how many died in bondage.

The Civil War is still being fought and the legacy of 250 years of unspeakable brutality in slavery still overshadows us. We need to recognize that. A part of it was fought on the streets of Minneapolis when George Floyd was murdered by police. It has been fought in countless situations in which black Americans have been murdered by police for minor traffic violations. It is fought every time a protest in a city’s streets becomes violent. We need to reconcile ourselves with our past. I don’t have a solution. But we need to find a way to do it or we are screwed.