A More Perfect Union

Mike Ramm

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner

In the late nineties my reading interests suddenly changed, and the change was drastic.  For two years, I didn't read classic or contemporary literature.  Neither did I read fantasy or science fiction novels.  I even deferred my annual reading of The Lord of the Rings, which, to anyone who knows me, is a reason to be at least mildly concerned.  In fact, judging by the books that still occupy the top two shelves of my bookcase, books that I purchased and pored over during my two year obsession, you wouldn’t guess that I’m actually an English major. The Battle Cry of Freedom, 1865, A Stillness at Appomattox: these are the kind of books that belong to a history major.  Specifically, a Civil War buff.

I’m not usually drawn to military history.  My heroes are not war heroes.  My thinking is not tactical thinking.  My deep dive into all things Civil War was very much out of character, and for the longest time I asked myself what was it all for?  Why did I feel so compelled?  What was it I had to learn?  

An answer began to emerge when I learned how the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg was commemorated.  Veterans from both armies, now old men, reenacted the third day of the battle, otherwise known as Pickett’s Charge.  (Technically speaking, Pickett’s Charge should be known as Longstreet’s Assault.  Civil War enthusiasts pick up on this kind of thing.)  Army of the Potomac veterans took cover behind a stone wall running through open farmland, the same position they occupied on July 3, 1863.  Army of Northern Virginia veterans, as they had done fifty years earlier, marched in formation in a frontal attack.  When they were within range, the former combatants raised their rifle muskets, loaded with blank cartridges, and fired at each other.  But the mock battle didn’t go as planned.  Spontaneously, the Union veterans set down their weapons.  The Confederate veterans set down theirs.  Then they reached over that divisive wall and shook hands.  They just couldn’t put each other in their gun sights anymore.  

50th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg

I don’t want to over romanticize this.  After the reenactment, the veterans of the two armies went back to their tents and didn’t interact much if it all. Then they went home, steeping themselves once again in their regional biases.  Even so, I can’t dismiss the image of those battle hardened veterans laying down their arms and embracing their old enemies.  Of all the takeaways from my study of the Civil War, this is the one that made the deepest impression: reconciliation is possible, maybe even inevitable. 

Hard to swallow, I know, considering how polarized we’ve become.  We’ve chosen our sides. We’ve tailored our beliefs and attitudes to match our respective parties.  In the process we’ve estranged ourselves from the family and friends who have chosen otherwise.  And to those family and friends on the other side who aren’t yet sundered from us, well, we just don’t talk politics, do we? Substitute the word slavery for politics and you can see how we’re reenacting a very familiar plot.  Yet, I still hold to the hope of reconciliation.  I have a good reason.

I’m a Yankee. My grandparents hailed from Maine.  My mother was born there.  After I graduated from college, I rendezvoused with my grandparents, now Californians, who were in Maine visiting family.  My grandfather, a Methodist minister, took me on a tour of the churches he once served, some of them white steepled country churches typical of New England.  While driving through North Anson Village, he pointed out his boyhood home, a beautiful farmhouse surrounded by green pasture running down to the Kennebec River. 

My grandfather’s home in North Anson, Maine, circa 1931

I returned to California soon after, and a few years later I married Karen, an Alabama native whose family moved out west when she was six.  My father-in-law, although he is no longer the good ole boy he once was, occasionally slips up and thanks me by saying, "That's mighty white of you!”   His great grandfather, Joshua Gray, was a slave owner.  

During the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate soldiers from the 15th and 47th Alabama regiments–Karen’s kin maybe–attacked the Union Army’s left flank defended by the 20th Maine–distant relatives of mine perhaps–in the famous battle of Little Round Top, a pivotal engagement in a pivotal battle.  Had the 20th Maine not held its position, the battle, and consequently the war, could’ve gone the other way. 

The Battle of Little Round Top

One hundred and twenty-one years later, the descendant of an Alabama slave owner and the descendant of New England farmers and fishermen married each other in Newcastle, California. I like to think that Karen and I, through our marriage, are participating in an ongoing reconciliation, a slow, albeit invisible, sealing of the breach.  

Yeah, right!

Talk about over-romanticizing!   Ongoing reconciliation?  Nothing but sentimental fantasy!  Sealing the breach? The worst kind of new age hooey!  Not to mention just how corny it all sounds, and part of me wants to take it back.  But I can’t take it back.  Not after what I learned.

At first I thought it was a practical joke: what my genealogist mother-in-law told me shortly after I married her daughter.  In fact, the first thing I said in response to her revelation was Bullshit!  But what she told me is true.  The documentation verifies it.  Joshua Gray, the slave owning paterfamilias of my wife’s clan, was not from Alabama.  He only ended up there.  He couldn’t pay his debts, so he got out of town.  That town being, incredibly, North Anson, Maine!   I said bullshit because I thought my mother-in-law somehow knew about my family’s North Anson connection and was having fun pulling my leg.  But she knew nothing of my ancestry and so was just as flabbergasted as I was at the coincidence…if coincidence you call it.  She then dug out a copy of a property map she uncovered in her research which marked the locations of North Anson homesteads in the early nineteenth century.   Even more incredibly, we found on the map where a Gray homestead shared a boundary with one of the homesteads of the Spauldings (the family name of my grandfather).  All these years later, I’m still in awe of the implication…

Clearly, there are forces in this world working to divide us.  Hidden from our sight–except on those rare and miraculous occasions–is the force that is working to reconcile us, and, sentimental fantasy or not, I choose to see my marriage, and all the historical threads woven into it, as a microcosm of what creation is working toward.  A more perfect union. 

Yankee meets Southern belle