In her April 12 column, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Elizabeth Allston, a South Carolina plantation owner and writer, who described the reaction of the people of Charleston when the state seceded from the Union in 1860: “The whole town was in an uproar. Parades, shouting, firecrackers, bells ringing, cannon on the forts booming, flags waving, and excited people thronging the streets.”
Five years later, 258,000 Confederate soldiers lay dead on faraway battlefields, 360,222 Union soldiers with them, and an estimated 50,000 southern civilians also dead from the war.
A total of 668,222 Americans were killed in a war that should have never been fought, a war whose beginnings the residents of Charleston celebrated in the streets of their beloved city only to see it later destroyed.
As a native southerner, those people were my ancestors. I wish I could ask them a simple question, “What were you thinking?”
Isn’t that often the question history raises?
To the Christians who joined the six great Crusades from 1096 to 1271 that killed some 1.7 million people, doesn’t history ask them the same thing, “What were you thinking?”
To the emperors, armies, and loyal patriots who fought the Hundred Years War between England and France in the late middle ages that killed over 3 million people, history asks, “What were you thinking?”
To President Martin Van Buren who ordered the U. S. Army to force the relocation of the Cherokee peoples from the region of North Carolina and Georgia that came to known as the Trail of Tears that resulted in the death of 4000 native Americans, doesn’t history look him in the eye and ask, “What, sir, were you thinking?”
To the over 17 million German citizens who voted for Hitler in 1933 history’s question is, “What were you thinking?”
To the 74 million plus Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 after witnessing the corruption, incompetence, and sleaze of his presidency, history’s question is, “What were you thinking?”
History is always a sobering reminder of just how misguided, foolish, and morally blind people can be in the decisions they make. It happens so often, in fact, that I wonder if Shakespeare’s Antonio in “The Tempest” didn’t get it exactly right when he said, “What’s past is prologue”?
Because people make such tragic decisions so often, it does seem as if what has happened becomes the precursor to what eventually does happen.
Human beings are amazingly capable of doing wonderful things, accomplishing great feats, of solving what seem like unsolvable problems.
At the same time, we are equally capable of making bad decisions, stupid decisions, tragic decisions, even when the horrible consequences they would produce can be anticipated by anyone with eyes to see.
And so history tells the story of the consequences of decisions people made that were so obviously wrong that future generations ask themselves, “What were they thinking?”
But what if people stopped before they made such decisions and asked themselves, “What am I thinking?” How different would history have been?
But, alas, history tells us more.
It tells us that sometimes before people realize how wrong they are they must experience getting what they want only to discover that they don’t want what they got.
Of course, by then it’s too late. Nations don’t get to go back and undo a bad decision their people made. Instead, they are forced to live with the consequences, ever how tragic they may be.
Is that where we’re headed as a country? Will it take our getting a second term with Donald Trump in the White House before we realize that we don’t want what we got?
As is always the case, it’s in our hands, just as it was for the cheering crowds in the streets of Charleston before they suffered the devastation of the war they thought they wanted.
But all is not lost yet. We still have time to ask ourselves, “What are we thinking?”
If we don’t do that, then the history we will write will surely cause future generations of Americans to ask themselves the question of all questions, “What were they thinking? What in the world could they have possibly been thinking?”
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