Due to the amount of school work that I need to complete this week compared with next week, I have chosen to focus on research after this week. I have looked at further dates about 19th century immigration policy, but most of what I found, and most of what I know, directly relates to limiting Chinese immigration. While it is fairly clear to me that the exclusion of Chinese immigrants led to a wider acceptance of Irish immigrants into the “melting pot,” I am still determining whether or not I can make that sufficiently clear to justify placing something like the 1875 Immigration Act as an event on the timeline. Next week I will add my dates to the timeline document and finally make my way to the Woodson Research Center to look through Muir’s notes on Dowling.
Tony Horwitz’s writing on divisions in the community of Salisbury, North Carolina highlights the essential issues in the ways in which groups like the UDC choose to remember the Civil War- or, perhaps more accurately, live the Civil War today. As seen in Thomas Brown’s book on Civil War commemoration art, much of the funding for Civil War confederation comes from these heritage groups. Interestingly, Brown did not explore the relationship between how the creators envisioned the image and how other communities saw it as they negotiated with it in their own daily lives. Horwitz takes on this issue in a way that historians are often unable to. He directly talked with people about how they feel about the commemoration of the Civil War in the South. Although many African Americans were “indifferent” about events like Lee-Jackson gatherings, “one man didn’t share this indifference,” citing issues like compromise through fellowship and idolatry (43). This concept of idolatry ties in rather well with his earlier revelation that a member of the UDC stopped being a Methodist in order to focus on researching the Civil War because “there wasn’t time for both” (33).
These groups teach their children to follow the same idolatry of the “War Between the States” without providing a full, broad historical context for them to understand. However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, there are few schools that provide a full, broad historiography to their students rather than teaching to the test. The issue that plagues these groups is not that they fail to teach their children everything but that they teach them ideals that keep them separate from the rest of the community. Rather than coexisting, they are used as mouthpieces for a side of a war that ended almost 150 years ago. The Civil War was a historical event, and it should be regarded as such. As long as groups like the UDC and the UCV exist in a vacuum, they cannot rightly expect to be accepted by the communities they live in. By living in the present and coexisting, perhaps there can be a new form of Civil War commemoration that respects the nuanced struggles inherent in the events related to it.