Contrary to cursory impression., America is far from healed from her civil war. The essays in Empathy is the Key attempt to throw light on why this is so and on how critical the capacity to be empathic will be if full healing is ever to be reached. The first of these essays, epitomizing the spirit of all that is to follow, deals with the two most towering figures to emerge from America's fratricidal war, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. That one is usually elevated far above the other, that they are seldom admired together, hints at how far we have yet to travel. The more we can feel our way into the lives of those "on the other side," whether considered alien or enemy--the more, in other words, we can see things from their point of view, walk a mile in their shoes--the less we will be inclined to judge them harshly. We may even come to accord them if not full understanding as least genuine respect.
When respect in the North is accorded not only Robert E. Lee but the likes of Stonewall Jackson and even Nathan Bedford Forrest, or in the South not only Abraham Lincoln but men like Ulysses Grant and even John Brown, or in North as well as South a Grant far transcending "butcher" and drunkard," or in the South its own scapegoated James Longstreet and Virginia patriots like Winfield Scott choosing to honor oath to country before allegiance to home state, or in North as well as South both Mosby's Confederacy and the Underground Railroad--when such respect is accorded, healing worthy of the name will then have a chance.
But the healing Americans are most distant from is that between white and black.
A huge step was taken in 1876 towards reconciling once-warring Northern and Southern whites when the attempt to "reconstruct" the South by means of a military federal presence to protect the rights of those newly freed was abandonned. The price agreed on for this reconciliation, however, was that blacks would be back at the mercy of Southern whites, who had other ways and means, short of literal slavery, to keep them in their place.
And not only that. Slavery, in the mythology born after the war to ennoble the Confederate cause, was downplayed as having the primary causative role in the build-up to that catastrophic destruction. The cause the South fought for became--as noble as that led by Washington in the first Revolution--states rights and independence and agrarian over industrial economy, with slavery being but the pretext for the hostilities instigated by the imperialistic North,. Not only let us deal with "the Negro problem" in our own way, the message went out, but quit rubbing our face in the slavery thing or reconciliation will remain a dream.
Only those massively defended against empathy could fail to see how this view, which become prevalent among Northern whites as well--not surprisingly since the racism that had undergirded slavery was not limited to one region--literally adds insult to injury for millions of African-American discendants of slaves., Healing doesn't have a prayer until the courage is found to face and accept the painful truth about slavery's corrosive embeddedness in American history that can not only free us but heal us. The author's companion volume to this present one, Steppingstones to the Civil War, attempts to trace slavery's overwhelming centrality in the build-up to the conflict that nearly tore asunder the American Union.
It should not be too bold a dream, in a nation rooted both in Judaeo-Christian ideals--exodus from slavery and redemption from sin--and in Enlightenment ideals--liberty and justice for all--that perhaps the highest respect will some day be accorded abolitionists black and white, long in the shadows of American history, who, recognizing the momentous injustice of slavery for what it was, literally laid their lives on the line, against odds it takes empathy to imagine, to shake awake a beloved but slumbering nation to its founding ideals.
