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There is a pleasure in re-reading beloved books. You traverse the same wilderness of words and find things that you maybe did not notice before, or things that perhaps you had forgotten. I feel a similar pleasure walking the battlefields of the Civil War, Gettysburg in particular. You can study the history of the battlefield, the broad sweeps of the story from the Buford holding the line on the first day, the martyr-death of Reynolds, the fighting at Little Round Top, Pickett’s Charge and many others. However, they are smaller stories, chapter within chapters of the battle that you really need a decent storyteller to carry you through. Jim Pangburn is definitively one of those storytellers. Walking with him is both to hear the same stories retold a thousand different and new ways, but also to hear new stories. There is always a new story, one you have never heard before. That is the continuing allure of the battlefield for me, and I believe for countless others as well. How do we commemorate these stories? Most often, through monuments. I have written before on the monuments of the Battle of Gettysburg, but in the course of one week I have had my perspective on these simple stone markers broadened  and deepened. On the Thursday before my Saturday day-trip to Gettysburg, I got the chance to sit down and talk with Allen C. Guelzo, one of the pre-eminent Civil War historians. During our talk, I asked him about the history of monument-placing on the battlefield. What he described for me was a transition from memorials to monuments. Memorials were placed by veterans of the battle because the wanted to commemorate and memorialize what they did there, and the comrades who fell in the battle. As time went on, and the children of those veterans returned to the battlefield, it became a monument to those who fought in a distant point in the past that perhaps no living person has lived memory of. As Pangburn took us through the battlefields, he illustrated another side of the story. For many of those who fought on the Union side, the markers they placed were for individual regiments, whereas the Confederate monuments were largely placed on a state-by-state basis. Which is not to say that there are no state monuments for the Union side; being a Pennsylvanian myself, I swell with pride to know that my home-state provided the bulk of Union soldiers during the battle and that we rightfully have the largest monument on the battlefield. Additionally, there was disparity between the monuments from veterans who raised money by themselves to make and place these memorials, and those monuments that were paid for by grants from the individual states. For example, on Little Round Top, there are two monuments to the 91st Pennsylvania facing each other. One is smaller and more modest, the other large and ostentatious. The larger one was provided by money coming from the state of Pennsylvania, and you can tell from the cast-iron plaque bearing the state seal of Pennsylvania. 

Much of our relationship with the Civil War is one of a battle for memory. How do we memorialize this momentous and identity-forming time in the history of our nation? The monuments on the battlefield are testament to past and even present efforts to put something of this memory into stone. The most recent monument placed was back in 2000, so this all still a very modern and ongoing process.  Who do we remember? In the past century, we have done a disservice to those held in slavery and their descendants by not remembering and memorializing the suffering experienced at the hand of the chain and whip. This is all still an ongoing process. Take a walk over the battlefield again, and meditate on where we are going with this into the future.

Is there anything new to say about Abraham Lincoln? Apparently, there always has been. Bucknell University was honored on April 14th with the presence of Professor Allen C. Guelzo, the foremost leading Civil War and Abraham Lincoln historian. During his talk, Professor Guelzo outlined the long and contentious history of Lincoln biography. As the talk continued, Guelzo revealed that the art of crafting a Lincoln biography is more than merely listing the events of his life in chronological order, but that there is a more contentious debate on his character as it reflects the character of the nation he sought to keep united. 

In Guelzo’s retelling of the process of crafting a Lincoln biography, he states that this process began immediately after Lincoln’s assassination. Josiah Gilbert Holland, a journalist and novelist from Massachusetts, traveled out to Springfield to begin writing a biography of the martyred President. Once there, he meets William Herndon, Lincoln’s old law partner. It is their collaboration that creates the first image of Lincoln for the public. Herndon tirelessly researched Lincoln’s life before the presidency, looking for details of his character that would lead him to the White House. 

At the same time that Holland and Herndon were doing their research, Lincoln’s personal secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay were compiling their own record on the life of Lincoln. However, where Holland and Herndon focussed their research on Lincoln’s life before the Presidency, Hay and Nicolay dived into the papers and records of the Lincoln presidency. This makes logical sense, as they were so close with Lincoln during this period. They were aided by Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, who had control of his father’s papers. It is here, Guelzo makes clear,  that two streams of Lincoln biography emerged. The first being the “Reminiscences of Lincoln” that was the style of Holland and Herndon, and the second being the “Presidential Lincoln” that was informed by the partnership of Hay and Nicolay with Robert Todd Lincoln. Of particular note, regarding the future writing of Lincoln biographies is that Lincoln’s papers were not officially released to the public until 1947, as was detailed in Robert Todd Lincoln’s will.

From this detailing of early Lincoln biography, Professor Guelzo then turns his attention to the early twentieth century and the process of progressive writers appropriating the biography of Lincoln for political ends. The most pointed example that he cites is the biograph James Garfield Randall, who portrays Lincoln as a progressive prophet. What is interesting is that there was still a strong progressive streak in Lincoln’s Republican party, but Randall was writing as a Progressive Democrat who was sketching Lincoln out as a precedent for the policies of President Woodrow Wilson. Progressives, however, turned on Lincoln after the First World War, abandoning him as the banner for their policies.

To wrap up his talk, Guelzo turns from these early efforts at Lincoln biography to the modern efforts. Efforts informed by the release of Abraham Lincoln’s personal papers in 1947, as detailed in Robert Todd Lincoln’s will. Guelzo highlights the biography of Benjamin Thomas’ 1952 biography of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, as setting the gold standard for future Lincoln biographies. From this, he informs his audience that the two major trends in Lincoln biography are a focus on Lincoln’s law career, and an effort at the recovery of the ideological, conservative Lincoln. From the progressive appropriations of Lincoln’s image in the early 20th century, Lincoln scholarship has returned to Lincoln’s own Republican party, to make him out to be the sole figure of the political culture of that party. Guelzo cemented this claim in a post-talk Q&A session, where he states that Lincoln is still central to the political culture of the Republican party. 

Whether there is anything new to be said about Lincoln must be met with the acknowledgement that our view of and need for Lincoln has evolved and shall continue to evolve along with the country he led out of disunion into liberty. Guelzo concludes his visit to Bucknell by cheerfully detailing the supportive, congenial community of Lincoln scholars that he proudly counts himself among.

A young man in middle school has a problem. He is of short stature, wears glasses, excels in his classes, and has never considered himself to be athletic in any sense. One thing he does have is a sense of self-respect. This, too often, makes one the victim of those lacking a sense of self-respect. In his school, he would like to make friends, he would like to gain the acceptance of those around him, to be seen as an equal. Yet, another young man, larger in stature and lacking that sense of self-respect, cannot help but hate him as an extension of hating himself. He bullies the former young man, making him feel small and insignificant; keeping him from acting and feeling like an equal in their school. The former  young man tells the teacher about his issue, but they do not do anything about it. This continues so to the point that one day, our young man decides to retaliate violently against his bully. For this, he gets detention.

Violence, like in the above story, is often reacted to punitively in our society. That is a valid approach, we do not want to have a population on our hands that assaults each other for the fun of it. However, it might just be that we are operating with an incomplete conception of violence. The young man is guilty of violence, but was not his bully? Is not repeatedly degrading an individual to the point that they resist forcefully also a form of violence? There is a form of violence that too often goes unnoticed, too often goes unaddressed, and too often becomes normalized; these days, the name we have for this kind of violence is “systemic oppression.” Resistance to the quiet violence of systemic oppression is perhaps the only instance when violence is justified. There is something more pernicious about the violence of systemic oppression that does justify resistance of whatever form. 

Look to Ukraine; there a larger, more powerful country is invading and bearing down on its neighbor to bring it into its sphere of influence and to subject the Ukrainian people to the brand of kleptocracy that has been ruling the Russian people for the past twenty years – this is an causal result of centuries of Russian systemic oppression of the Ukrainian people. Do we condemn the Ukrainian people for their resistance to their oppressors? Of course we do not; we valorize them as heroes. Why then, do we not think of Nat Turner as a hero? Some might, in retrospect, look at him and the members of his rebellion as heroes. The 2016 film The Birth of a Nation certainly portrays Turner as a hero. This is only a very recent way of viewing Nat Turner and his rebellion; before he was either treated with fear and hatred, or simply considered as an impersonal and unromantic footnote in the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere. Slavery, for decades before and decades after Nat Turner’s rebellion, was normalized and permitted to continue by parties in both the North and the South. Nat Turner’s rebellion was a resistance against an oppressor, and in this, his violence was justified. 

Some might take the above argument and say that the same applies to the Confederacy during the Civil War. This “Lost Cause” mentality of the Southern States rebelling against the Northern oppressors who wanted to change their way of life is solipsism. The south always knew that it had the option to secede and become violent in order to continue that system of oppression. It is analogous to the game the whole Western world is playing with Russia right now. Russia could always turn this war in Ukraine into worldwide conflagration, and so could the rest of us. We do not want it to get to that point. However, the oppressed hardly has any choice in their oppression, it’s the oppressor who is alway intimately aware of their violent agency. Which is why violence in retaliation is often what comes out of oppressed peoples. They never want it, but when pushed to it, they will fight with all of their strength, with all of their souls.

In reference to the way a society as a whole (within and without it’s government structure), it is customary to speak of “estates.” The First Estate is the clergy and religious establishment, the Second Estate are the nobles and ruling classes, the Third Estate is the peasants and bourgeoisie, and the Fourth Estate is the press. It is these estates that come together to control something that the nation calls a government. If the two films in question, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and The Birth of a Nation (2016) are both speaking about American society and government in different ways, they do so through different estates. In this way, it is difficult to say whether they present contrasting or comparative views of American society. 

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is ostensibly a film about American politics, but the larger commentary and driving force of the plot is the role of journalism (the Fourth Estate) in American society and governance. The main villain in the film is a man named Jim Taylor, a man with broad business interests but who is primarily the owner of several prominent newspapers. He is the “boss” behind the political machine in the protagonist, Jefferson Smith’s, home state. The film opens with the one Senator dying unexpectedly, after which there is a prolonged discussion between Taylor and the other Senator, Joseph Paine, on who the Governor (also controlled by Taylor) should pick as the interim Senator. The corruption within this part of the system is made apparent in the first ten minutes of the film. When, through a series of events, Jefferson Smith is nominated and sworn in as the interim Senator, he slowly uncovers Taylor’s political machine and fights against it. In the film’s climatic denouement, Smith uses the filibuster to take up as much time as he can to get the word out to the people of his state. What follows is a montage of press battles in his home state; Taylor begins a smear campaign to paint Smith out to be the bad guy while Smith’s own little paper, Boy’s World, wages a counter-campaign. Smith is a man of the people, or more a man for the boy’s of America. He has a naïve streak, but that he also has a press of his own is no insignificant detail. Smith understands the power of the press, and uses it in his own, albeit limited, way to defend himself and alert the people of his home state to the evils of Jim Taylor and his political machine. 

The Birth of a Nation is ostensibly a film about slavery, but, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the larger commentary and driving force of it’s plot is the role of religion (the Second Estate) in American society. The main villain of this film is difficult to pinpoint, but all of the characters that could be considered are in some way related to the clergy; Sam Turner is the son of a preacher and is largely spurned on his actions by the character of Reverend Zalthall. Sam is encouraged by Reverend Zalthall to tour around with his slave, Nat, who will preach at other plantations to keep the slaves there from rising up against their masters. Nat, in this first part of the film, is used as a tool in the instrumentalizing of religion to support slavery. As Nat sees the horrors of slavery during his touring preaching, he does not lose his faith. Rather, his faith becomes stronger. In one pointed scene, the Reverend Zalthall and Nat quote Bible passages at each other by way of argument over the institution of slavery. When Nat decides to organize his rebellion, he makes comment on how the Bible contains lines that are used to support and justify slavery as well as lines that argue against slavery and forbid it. Nat experiences a shift from using religion to bolster the institution of slavery to using that same religion as his impetus for rebellion against slaveholders.

Nat Turner and Jefferson Smith are both distinctly American protagonists. Nat Turner represents the long history of slavery and anti-blackness that has pervaded in this country. Jefferson Smith represents the idealistic American that is deeply tied to a love for the land. Their stories and their depictions are only contradictory so far as both of these elements are prevalent in this country. Another point of important similarities is how they use the above discussed tools in protest. The press, as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington demonstrated, is often used by private interests to manipulate public opinion for their own ends. Yet, the “common man” of Jefferson Smith is able to use free speech, both in the filibuster and in the press, to fight against this self-same force; it is the press being used to fight the press. Religion, as The Birth of a Nation demonstrated, was used to support the institution of slavery both in the public sphere but also in the minds of the enslaved persons. Yet, the “slave preacher” of Nat Turner is able to use religion to spurn on rebellion; it is religion being used to fight religion. In tone, these films do differ, and their subject matter is also different. However, there is this central theme of a kind of “David versus Goliath” story that shows to the viewer that the same tools of oppression can, with the right motivation in the right hands, be tools of liberation.