The unrepentant South

LARA MARLOWE in Charleston, South Carolina

150 years after the American Civil War began and half a century after the civil-rights movement, old arguments still simmer between blacks and whites. A new series explores race, identity and history in today’s American South

THE AMERICAN Civil War started here, 150 years ago, when South Carolina’s militias opened fire on the Yankees, in Fort Sumter, on an island in the middle of Charleston Harbor. The cataclysmic war that followed killed 620,000 Americans, more than any other conflict in the nation’s history.

Over the next four years, a quarter of the South’s men would perish. Slavery would be abolished. And Abraham Lincoln would achieve his goal of forcibly reuniting the States.

But time has not healed all wounds. A century and a half later, the descendants of the protagonists still cannot agree who started the conflict and why.

For the North, South Carolina precipitated the war by withdrawing from the United States, because it wanted to preserve the institution of slavery. Many Southern whites claim the war was not about slavery but was started by Abraham Lincoln to safeguard income from the South’s cotton and tobacco exports for building northern infrastructure.

Today, horse-drawn carriages rattle through cobble-stone streets, past fine Georgian buildings nestled among magnolia and crepe myrtle trees. Charleston remains a monument to the wealth and charmed life of slave-owning planters and merchants in the antebellum South. For the tourists who flock here, it’s like turning to the opening pages of Gone with the Wind.

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Via Dan