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Civil War focus of event with unusual name - Chautauqua |
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Written by Rebecca Boyle
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Wednesday, 02 August 2006 |
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Page 1 of 3
 Our Founding Fathers could see it coming.
The great men who declared we were all entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did not want their fledgling nation to fail, so they made their gravest and most lasting error: They did not solve the question of slavery.
Four score and five years after the Declaration of Independence, the bonds forged by our fathers’ tenacity were in tatters, and the great experiment called the United States of America almost failed in the Civil War.
The “Battle Between the States” is here again this week during the High Plains Chautauqua in Greeley, and portrayals of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun and William Lloyd Garrison will enlighten audiences about how the war began.
“All of these problems were brewing for years and decades, and they will be able to bring this to light, how far apart the two sides had grown,” said Jane Adams, program director for Chautauqua at Aims Community College.
To truly understand the resounding impact of the war, one must look to the past — a main mission of Chautauqua, which brings scholars from throughout the country to portray important characters in history.
Some historians argue the foundation for the Civil War was laid in the Constitution, but four-fifths of a century passes before a new shot heard ‘round the world is fired at Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861.
President Lincoln is elected in 1860, prompting the secession of seven states whose legislatures fear the new president will abolish slavery, though in his inaugural address, Lincoln says he will not end slavery where it already exists.
“A lot of Southerners don’t want to take him at his word,” said Donald Shaffer, a history professor at the University of Northern Colorado who specializes in Civil War history.
Seven states secede in January 1861.
Lincoln’s newly minted Republican Party commits itself to stopping the spread of slavery to the West, where miners start to find gold in the 1840s and 1850s.
But Southerners fear they might have to move west to seek fresh soil for their cotton crops, the main export of the antebellum United States. Some Southerners, like Calhoun, claim stopping slavery’s expansion could soon become the end of slavery in general.
On Wednesday, Joseph Stukes of Florence, S.C., will portray Calhoun, and Doug Mishler, a professor at the University of Nevada-Reno, will portray Garrison, a strident abolitionist. Adams said the two scholars will set the stage for the beginning of the war.
Garrison and Calhoun represented the radical ends of the 19th-century political spectrum, Shaffer said.
“(Calhoun) would talk about slavery as just being another type of property, and say the federal government should be defending property rights rather than putting a type of property on the road to extinction,” Shaffer said.
When Lincoln is elected, Southerners already feeling outnumbered in the House of Representatives now face a potentially hostile president, Shaffer said.
“They say, ‘Why are we still in this country? We need to start our own country,’” he said.
So they do. Four more states eventually secede and the 11 states form the Confederate States of America, naming Mississippi Sen. Jefferson Davis the provisional president.
“Ask Southerners what they are fighting for, and they would not say slavery,” Shaffer said. “They would say, ‘We are fighting to defend our homes. We are fighting to determine our own destiny.’”
The next four years are marked by unprecedented battlefield carnage, spurred by advances in weaponry — especially the rifled musket, which killed more efficiently — and widespread disease. About 630,000 Americans died in the war.
Two and a half years before General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox courthouse, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
Characterizations of Harriet Tubman, who helped run the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape to the North, and Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became an orator and editor, are scheduled for Thursday night. Gwendolyn Briley-Strand of the Washington, D.C., area portrays Tubman and Charles Everett Pace of Austin, Texas will invoke Douglass, Adams said.
“They’re going to be really eloquent voices to speak about the slavery experience,” Adams said.
It was an experience some of our Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, perpetuated despite their own abhorrence of slavery. In his 1821 autobiography, Jefferson wrote, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
After 42 long years, his vision came true, and at a tremendous cost.
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