Civil Wars and Moral Ambiguity

And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished as though they had not been, and are perished as though they had not been born. Ecclesiastics 44

Can a case be made for a memorial to the Confederate dead at Harvard? Of course it can, and the case deserves a better hearing Chan is allowed by the present hurling of moral invective. I have been engaged in this very public discussion now for nearly 20 years, and thus am no newcomer so the issues which only in recent days appear to have excited, the Crimson editorialists and the Black Law Students Association. The community deserves to know something of the back-ground of this issue, and of why I, at least, have devoted years of writing and speaking on the subject of the Confederate dead.

First, some clarification is in order. Certain of my ancestors were in chattel slavery, and thus were victims of that southern culture which took its institutional form in the Confederacy. My ancestors were freed as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation and the efforts of the Union Army, and we have never forgotten that. My grandmother was born in 1863, the year of the Emancipation, in Richmond, Virginia: when she came north to join her northern relative who had long been free she always referred to the Civil War as the "War of the Rebellion;" and she bore no sentimental brief for Robert E. Lee or for his kind. Eventually she settled here in Cambridge with her husband a local clergyman, and doubtless she walked within the shadows of Memorial Hall, perhaps taking the time from its clock tower. She knew that that building, then the largest academic building in North America, was a monument not only to the dead Harvard men of the Union Army, but to the freedom of her people as well. Her daughter, my mother, brought me as a child on the obligatory tour of Harvard to see the glass flowers and the Yard, and took me to the transept of Memorial Hall, a sacred space: old graduates took their hats off upon entering and although I cannot remember if I was impressed, I am certain that my mother was. She knew what that building meant, and so too do I. I do not require instruction on that point by anyone living.

The Memorial Church, as is well known, is a memorial, first to the Harvard dead of the First World War. At the time of the building of the Church in 1932, the question was raised as to whether this was a monument to the victors, or to the Harvard men who died in the war, and a controversy raged across the pages of The Crimson and within the alumni body, President Lowell decided the issue in favor of the allies, and their names are inscribed in the Memorial Room.

My predecessors on the Board of Preachers, however, were not willing to see a Christian Church as a monument only to a victorious cause no matter how righteous, and wished posterity to be reminded of the human sacrifice of Harvard men drawn into the universal folly of war. They thus erected what I continue to believe is the most elegant and moving of all of Harvard's memorials located on the north wall of the Church and written in Latin, thus providing a decent obscurity against the sensibilities of those who would be offended, a bronze plaque reads "Harvard University has not forgotten its sons who under opposite colors also gave up their lives for their country," and there are listed five soldiers of the Kaiser.

It was this plaque, perhaps more than any other single issue, that persuaded me of the value of a commemoration of the Confederate dead. It had nothing to do with the righteousness of their cause, or with a form of moral amnesia, as The Crimson suggests, and everything to do with the hope that after nearly a century and a half the University could reconcile at least in memory, its dead sons as a sign of the abiding fellowship of memory and of hope to which the University aspires. Never was it to be a patch-up job over fundamental differences. No one who has ever seen the German War Memorial would think for one moment that Harvard University endorsed the cause of the Kaiser, nor would the World War II memorial to Adolph Saanwald imply an endorsement of Hitler. Even the slowest tourist has more sophistication than that, and to imply that future generations of Harvard students would be confused at the sight of such a memorial to the Confederate dead and think it Harvard's endorsement of the "peculiar institution," certainly doesn't credit the future with much intelligence. The fact that other institutions have managed to commemorate their dead on both sides of the Civil War has not served to confuse their students or alumni as to where the institution stood in the conflict of 1861-1865. Of all the arguments against a Confederate memorial, this to me seems the most specious.

The case for a memorial to the Confederate dead did not begin with the current renovations of Memorial Hall, and in fact such a proposal was anticipated by the original of the Hall. Dedicated to "the graduates and students of the University who died in defense of the Union, or who served in its defense during the Rebellion of 1861," the deed of gift included the stipulation that "no picture, bust, tablet, monument, or memorial shall be allowed within said Hall inconsistent with its intent." So it was until Edgar H. Wells, editor of The Harvard Alumni Bulletin, raised the issue in an editorial in the Bulletin in 1909, in which he argued that "The Harvard men...whether they fought under the stars and stripes or under the stars and bars were first, last, and always Harvard men." There then ensued a lively debate in which were joined the great and the good of the day. The Alumni Bulletin of 1909-1910 was filled with letters, but the controversy was brought to an effective end through the leadership of Charles Francis Adams '56, who thought the issue of a Confederate memorial "undeserving of serious consideration," and wrote, "I do protest against any confusion between those who died in defense of their country and those who died in an effort to dissolve it.' Colonel Higginson wrote, "When there has been a great row such as we saw, isn't it the best thing after it to keep still."

It was in 1961, the centennial of the beginning of the Civil War, that Professor Mason Hammond '25, then Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, asked in a letter in The Alumni Bulletin if the "time had come" to consider a memorial to the southern dead as an act of reconciliation. I joined this cause in 1976, on the nation's bicentennial, raised it again as art issue at the time of the University's 350th anniversary celebrations in 1986, and have written and preached on the topic ever since. To my knowledge the initiative in all of these discussions has always been taken by Harvard people of impeccable Union credentials, and they have been under-taken openly and in a spirit of reconciliation not with a wicked cause, but with young lives who once shared the ideals of the University but who died at one another's hands in the most morally devastating of human conflicts, a civil war. As it was clear that both legal and moral considerations precluded such a memorial in Memorial Hall, I, armed with the charitable and useful precedents of two world wars, offered hospitality to the idea in The Memorial Church.

Broad discussions were held among the alumni, and appropriately so, for both Memorial Hall and The Memorial Church were their gifts to the University, and many views were shared. The committee of which I was a part had as its charge the canvassing of sentiment among the alumni, but I never understood my participation to be that of a neutral "fact finder," nor was that the role of the committee. My views on this subject have been well and widely known for a long period of time. As my predecessors argued for the "enemy" in World War I and World War II, so I argued in this case. The form of the memorial, incorporating both sides without designation, was a suggestion from an open meeting of the HAA executive committee held in May 1995 with lively undergraduate participation. I thought it then, and I think it now, a superior plan to the original. Nothing is taken from Memorial Hall or from the Union cause, and nothing endorses the Confederate cause. What is affirmed is the University's only memorial to all of its sons who died in the nation's defining conflict.

A letter to one of my predecessors about the "enemy casualty" of World War II makes the point. Attending the Baccalaureate service for his son in the early 1970s, a parent noticed the designation on the World War II tablet, and wrote, "Surely the influence of Harvard University on the lives of these young men should have created within them something more enduring and worthy of commemoration than the fact that largely due to no fault of their own they found themselves under the necessity of fighting as 'enemies' against the land and people with whom they had shared the riches of academic inquiry."

Memorials, as we know, are not merely monuments in stone or in bronze. They have a moral component, they try to communicate truth and the ones that are successful are so because they communicate their truth with clarity. Memorial hall is a brilliant success in this regard. I take nothing from it, but eloquent as it is, it speaks only a partial truth. All of Harvard men did not die for the Union. All of Harvard was not united in a righteous cause. Men then as now were divided by ideals and ideas: united by their experiences of life shared here in college they were divided in conflict, and are united now only in death. It is fitting that a University church should strive to tell a larger truth, and it does so, however painful or ambiguous it may appear to be, by the inclusion of the sons of Harvard in whose death the divisions of our community are made clear. When the German plaques are explained to our visitors the response is nearly always one of admiration and of awe: not for the German cause, but for the fact that in victory Harvard was magnanimous enough, secure enough and convinced enough of its own deals to recall these dead not as strangers or as enemies but as separated brethren. It moves us beyond the syndrome of "win/lose" and into the realm of tragedy and hope. A university that finds these ideals too risky to express is itself at risk.

I am convinced that the consideration of a memorial to the southern dead is a proper consideration for a community such as ours and I continue to believe that such a memorial is rooted in right principles and capable of speaking a truth that goes beyond the mere facts of the Civil War. If we are always to be "enemy" and "victor" with no hope of transcending those designations that kill and divide, then it appears that we can take no profit from tragedy and that the future will always be held hostage to the past. A memorial is not merely an artifact of the past. By its very nature it is a key to the future, a means of moving on from beyond the shadows of the past. Not only does it speak of what was, but it aspires to speak of that which ought to be. In our case such a memorial speaks of a country once tragically divided which now aspires to an authentic reconciliation, an elusive goal always ahead of us, always in the future.

Where I have seen an ideal of a fellowship both divided and united by the memory of its painful past and thus enabled to teach the future by recalling that past, others have seen a dastardly plot to rehabilitate the lost cause of the south, or to affirm in the present the subtle and not-so-subtle racist ideology of a society that has not yet reconciled itself to its citizens of color. This present discourse is complicated by the fact that while it would appear to be about unhealed wounds between the north and the south, it is really but another chapter in our society's sordid experience of racial relations. Alas, many will come to the conclusion that to commemorate the 64 southern dead Harvard graduates is to disconfirm the valid presence of African-Americans at Harvard. Symbols have consequences. As race is America's" original sin," we will never be able to regard the "race problem" as "solved;" and even here in a community the celebrates rationality, civility and diversity, it is only a thin veneer of these admirable qualities that keeps in check the passions and paranoias that are always lurking just beneath the surface of our discourse. So I should not be surprised that a memorial to the southern dead at Harvard would seem to call into question Harvard's own commitment to the true equality in the University of its members of color. Such an action, it has been suggested, would be seen as but one more part of the rejuvenated systematic attacks upon the legitimate aspirations of black people. It would reunite the whites while leaving the blacks once again outside.

I am not surprised by these conclusions, but I am saddened and disappointed that some of our brightest and best are driven to them. The tragedy of this state of affairs is not just Harvard's but the nation's, and it reminds us of the enormous unfinished business of race that will always be before us. Most of the causes worth fighting for are not given a warm welcome at first--The Crimson opposed the memorial to the German dead of World War I, after all--but most causes worth fighting for are also worth waiting for, and I should hope that the day will come when Harvard will be secure enough in its shared ideals to sustain a memorial to those of its sons who remind us of painful past divisions. Alas, I do not believe that that day has yet arrived, and for that reason, and with great sadness, I have concluded that I can no longer lend my support to the present proposal.

The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes is the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Minister in the Memorial Church.