Culture clash over Civil War in Virginia schools

The American Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865 between the Northern states, which wanted to end Black slavery and the Southern states which wanted to continue with the system. The North won the war. It was fought under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln. He issued the proclamation abolishing slavery. And he was assassinated in 1865.

The civil war took a huge toll where nearly 752,000 to 851,000 people had died. And the Confederate – as the southern states came to be known in contrast to the Union of northern states – sentiment and symbolism became a tricky and prickly issue for Americans in general.

The issue came back into public memory with the Black Lives Matter movement that erupted after a white policeman was held responsible for strangling a Black, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. It was during these protests that the names of two schools in Virginia rural county, Shenandoah County, were changed. They carried the names of Confederate generals in 2020. The schools were named after the southern generals in 1959 when the state Virginia was practising segregation. Now four years later, in the Republican and white majority county it has been decided to go back to the names of the Confederate generals.

It might seem a small matter concerning a remote school in rural Virginia. But the fight over the symbolism is much too volatile in present-day America. In 2017 there were protests by the pro-Confederate sections in Charlottesville over the removal of the statues of Confederate generals in town, Robert E Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. It is the names of these two generals, along with another, Turner Ashby, that were restored in the Shenandoah County for the schools.

More than 160 years after the Civil War, it should be considered a dead issue. But with racism still persisting, and white supremacists asserting themselves in the public domain, the United States is witnessing a culture war of serious proportions. The clash has become polarised with both sides adopting maximalist positions. For the white cultural elite in the southern states, the pre-Civil War society was not just about slavery. It went beyond to a nostalgic world of lifestyle and cultural sensibilities. This was portrayed with much care by many creative writers including novelists and poets from the southern states.

So, an unresolved conflict remains in the American hearts and minds. And when political divisions become sharp as they have now with the American right, led by former president Donald Trump, trying to establish its dominance, the old issues one thought were dead come alive. The quarrel over the memory of Confederate generals is a good example of nostalgia and division.

The radical progressives among the American youth and among the American liberals want to carry the fight deep into the right-wing arena by trying to show that the pro-slavery, racism should be named and shamed, and no quarter should be given to the unacceptable practice of slavery and racism in American history.

Many conservative Americans do not see the past in the simple black-and-white dichotomy. Though many of the right-wingers would not go as far as supporting slavery, they would continue to admire the pre-Civil War southern way of life. 

The progressives believe that any sympathy with an unacceptable practice of the past is morally objectionable. This leads to the general question as to how the past is to be read and understood. If the past is to seen in its totality, then there would be shades of grey. And it would be argued that slavery was an aspect of the Southern way of life, but there were other aspects. But when present-day tempers are on a high over present-day injustices, then there is little room for reasoned debates.