Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

I read eyewitness accounts of slavery by Frederick Douglass and others who describe a cruelty I can barely comprehend. I wince at Civil War soldiers’ descriptions of corpses rotting in trench mud, of limbs sawn off with nothing to dull the pain, of a Georgia prison called Andersonville in which more Union soldiers died of starvation than had died in the North’s five bloodiest battles combined. Something seems to crumble inside me as I read these accounts, which stay with me like an afterimage. The Confederate army no longer seems so honorable, the Lost Cause no longer so just. The war may have loosened the shackles of slavery, but more than a century later the spirit of racial hostility lives on. I feel engulfed by a sense of revulsion, not only at what I once believed to be true but also at myself. Growing up, I swallowed the myth. Guilt denied never goes away. The South casts the war, as it casts almost everything, in religious language. Historian Shelby Foote tells of a Confederate monument in his hometown dedicated to “the only nation that lived and died without sin.” On one of my childhood pilgrimages I visited the Richmond grave of Jefferson Davis, which has this inscription carved in stone: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That is the myth of the Lost Cause that I believed as a boy and through my adolescence. General Grant, who had seen the worst that war has to offer, expressed a different view at ...