Reading the article surprised me in the sense that it undermined my self-perception as a lover of history. There were some simple realities about the Civil War that Goodheart brings up which caused me to cock my head to the side and say to myself, "Wait. Why didn't I know that already?" For example, we all know in a general sense that the Emancipation Proclamation "freed the slaves." But what does that mean? For starters, it means that prior to the Proclamation, slaves weren't free--even after the onset of war with the South. So in the early stages of the Civil War, what was a Union military camp to do if a slave wandered onto its compound, asking for freedom? That is the intriguing true-to-history scenario about which Goodheart writes.
At one point Goodheart writes:
True, the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states.The Civil War era isn't particularly an area of interest to me, but I do remember those basic facts--the founding fathers support of slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Emancipation Proclamation. But I remember them in isolation from one another. Goodheart's article caused me to shake my head in disappointment at myself that the synthesis of those concepts and events weren't properly ingrained in my personal historical base of knowledge. If they had been, I wouldn't have been so surprised that an escaped slave presented such a complex conundrum for a Union general.
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