PERSPECTIVE ON THE CIVIL WAR : Ordinary Folk, Extraordinary Acts : We should remember how quickly the grand work became unfinished business--ours to complete

Like most historians, I was delighted that so many Americans sat riveted for 11 hours watching the public television presentation of “The Civil War.” But I hope that those 11 hours will not deceive other film makers into thinking that the subject is exhausted. So many stories remain to be told, stories that show how extraordinary events may draw extraordinary actions from ordinary people.

Let someone tell the stories of the fugitive slaves who escaped to the Union Army in their quest for freedom and of the soldiers who helped them. John Boston, a slave in Maryland, escaped from his owner to a Brooklyn regiment, probably much like other Northern regiments whose men taunted, stoned and drove away slaveholders who came within the lines looking for their runaway human property. Col. William L. Utley of the 22nd Wisconsin Volunteers lost no sleep over the news that officials in Kentucky planned to arrest him for haboring a fugitive slave. “They can never do it while there is a man left in the 22nd Regiment,” he boasted. Col. Smith D. Atkins of the 92nd Illinois threatened Kentucky slaveholders who had tried to seize fugitives sheltered by his regiment, saying that he would “fire a volley into them, so help him God!” When a general advised him to obey a court order for the return of fugitives, Atkins retorted that he could not “piddle away” his time in “hunting up niggers” because he was “altogether too busy with a terrible rebellion and bloody war.” Such soldiers were by no means moral prophets; they acted more often from a practical appreciation of the military intelligence slaves brought or the simple wish for servants willing to relieve them of drudgery. Even so, newspapers back home recounted with pride the refusal of hometown boys to be pushed around by arrogant slaveholders. State officials asked why their soldiers were called upon to perform the demeaning work of returning fugitives. Complaints made their way to the War Department and to Congress. The persistance of the fugitives soon created a political problem that politicians had to deal with politically. And so they did.

The House of Representatives resolved as early as July, 1861, that it was “no part of the duty of the soldiers of the United States to capture and return fugitive slaves.” In March, 1862, Congress forbade military personnel to return fugitive slaves, and in July--five months before the Emancipation Proclamation--declared the slaves of rebellious owners “forever free of their servitude.” The slaves had turned the Union Army into an army of liberation by the simple device of treating it as one, forcing first the soldiers, then Congress and finally Abraham Lincoln himself to ratify the transformation.

“Too busy to hunt up niggers” is not language to set beside “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” But it captures those first steps by which ordinary people grew into the stature required of them by an extraordinary situation. And because they grew, so did Congress and so did the President. Though a chasm may seem to divide “too busy to hunt up niggers” from “henceforth and forever free,” the first cleared the ground for the second, while blocking the path of retreat.

Not all the stories that remain to be told are uplifting. With the end of extraordinary circumstances, people shrank to ordinary stature. The scenes of reconciliation between white veterans of the Union and Confederate armies, so vividly evoked in “The Civil War,” had a grim mirror image that the audience did not see. No doffed hats, salutes or embraces marked the reunion of Confederate veterans and black veterans home from the Union Army. The vanquished rebels, magnanimously released with their weapons and their dignity by Yankees who admired their gallantry, returned home to vent their rancor against the former slaves, especially the black veterans and their families, through beatings, arson, torture, rape and murder. As the reunion of Blue and Gray grew more and more cordial, the white descendants of the blue concerned themselves less and less with what white Southerners did to black descendants of the blue.

As Americans today, we need to remember that moment when the people--fugitive slaves and black soldiers, white soldiers and their officers, the hometown press and home-state politicians--grew from their ordinary height to the stature demanded by the times, emboldening Congress and the President to grow along with them.

We also need to remember how quickly the grand work of the Civil War became unfinished business, which fell to later generations--and still falls to us--to complete.