The unfinished work that Abraham Lincoln referred to in the Gettysburg Address has been on my mind lately, as have the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Historian and blogger Heather Cox Richardson’s post this past Thanksgiving reviewed the circumstances surrounding Lincoln’s critical two-minute speech at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery in November 1863. We know it started “Four score and seven years ago” and led to “It is for us the living … to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us … that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
In 2009, my late sweetheart, Dan, and I traveled to Valdosta, Ga. for my granddaughter’s wedding. The pre-wedding reception was in a stately historic building with Spanish moss hanging off live oaks. We were surrounded by people we did not know. Dan struck up a first conversation with the bride’s other grandparents, who had lived their lives on military bases, largely in the South.
Dan, a native of Pennsylvania, had been reading a book about the events leading up to the battle of Gettysburg, a defeat for the Confederates that was a turning point in the Civil War. More than 3,000 Union soldiers died there, and thousands more were wounded defending the Constitution and the principle that “all men are created equal.” More died on the Confederate side.
Normally a somewhat reserved and even shy man, Dan spoke with animation about what he’d been learning about the battle. My mind began to wander. I wasn’t much interested in military history at the time. What got my attention, though: people said nothing, smiling with an artifice that hinted at extreme discomfort. His engaging, thoughtful voice and substance, which I only later realized was to them controversial, has me feeling proud of him in hindsight.
The moment comes back to me as I read Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020). It’s one of the titles in Pancheta Peterson’s Racial Justice Study Group, which meets biweekly in Wellfleet.
Seidule, a retired general and West Point history professor emeritus, makes a point of referring to Union troops as “the U.S. Army” to remove any sense of parity between the treasonous Confederates and the patriots defending the Constitution. He was late in reckoning with what his upbringing taught him. He writes of how as a child he aspired to be a Virginia gentleman like Lee and “never understood the repugnant nature of slavery or the powerful history of African-Americans” in his own city of Alexandria.
Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans, has written of the value of Seidule’s confrontation with the past: “As a nation, how can we know where we are going if we don’t know where we have been?”
King knew history and used that knowledge to imagine the future. “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” King said at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
My Georgia memory, Seidule’s book, and re-reading King’s words in this moment when rule-based civilization and humane regard for one another are under threat leaves me groping to understand how we got to this point. How is it possible, given so much progress, that someone with so little interest in following the law, in compassionate governance, and in the complexity of international relationships, who seems to care so little for his fellow citizens, now holds the reins of power and will be in charge of managing our shared concerns?
How close are we to another civil war when we know no war is truly civil?
At the end of the wedding party conversation, Dan said, “But then it was war, and all war is terrible.” Despite the immense loss of life and the horrendous suffering, ending the enslavement of seven million people and the nation’s economic dependency on the kidnapped and enslaved needed to happen.
What needs to happen now? We have a choice before us. As Dr. King asked back in 1968 in his last book: “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?”
The annual MLK Day silent walk and meditation begins in front of Wellfleet Town Hall at 11 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 20.
