![]() And the nation as a whole was soon to acquiesce in the repeated lynching of African Americans. Disfranchisement and the earliest segregation laws were on the immediate horizon in the South. The great promises of Reconstruction for the freed people hung in the balance as the Supreme Court was about to, in effect, overturn the legal establishment of black civil rights. I hear the piercing sounds of trumpets." Douglass was very much a Northern and African American partisan, but he had good reason to be worried by 1883. I see the recruiting sergeant with drum and fife calling for men, young men and strong, to go to the front and fill up the gaps made by rebel powder and pestilence. I see and hear the steady tramp of armed men in blue uniforms. "I see the flags from the windows and the housetops fluttering in the breeze. In an 1883 Decoration Day speech, Douglass soared to oratorical heights as he asked his audience to remember the war's deepest meanings and out of them forge a "common memory." "I seem even now to hear and feel the effects of the sights and the sounds of that dreadful period," Douglass declared. Douglass had lived a life from slavery to freedom, and in the final third of his life, from 1865 to 1895, he had contributed mightily to the national memory of the Civil War, which he considered the pivotal event of his own life and that of the United States. Ten years before Warren was born in 1905, and began listening to his former Confederate veteran grandfather tell him haunting stories of the war, Frederick Douglass, the Maryland-born slave and most prominent African American leader and writer of the 19th century, died in Washington, DC. ![]() It draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of personal as well as national fate." ![]() Warren said the Civil War was "our felt history, history lived in the national imagination. ![]() Robert Penn Warren, a Southern born and bred poet-novelist-historian, tells us that he grew up in Kentucky with a sense of the Civil War as the "emotional furniture of life." For many Americans still, at the 150th anniversary, those horrible and transformative events of 1861-65 are still deeply embedded in our national story and in our personal psyches. A turn-of-the-century Decoration Day (now know as Memorial Day) postcard ![]()
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