Ta-Nehisi Coates visits Gettysburg

He dreads his visit:



At this point, I've toured quite a few battlefields -- the Wilderness, Petersburg, Shiloh, Fort Donelson. I have, for several reasons, been dreading a trip to Gettysburg. I should say a return to Gettysburg, because I came here in middle school on a field trip. I remember liking it a great deal, but having no deliberate sense of the Civil War in relationship to slavery, or Gettysburg in relationship to slavery. I certainly didn't know that Confederate Armies had kidnapped free blacks during the campaign. Of course, once you understand that the South seceded to preserve an economy built on enslaved black people, the act doesn't seem that shocking.



but in the end sees that we're not all that bad after all:



I can't go much further, because I risk giving up my article. But the point I'm driving at it's very tough to consider Gettysburg, as its commonly rendered in the American imagination, when you're black. And yet in point of fact, perhaps more than any other battlefield in the country, the folks at Gettysburg have done a really good job in making clear that the war was about slavery. What struck me more than anything was the film in the visitor center. It was narrated by Morgan Freeman. There were quotes from Frederick Douglass. You really couldn't watch it and think the Civil War was about anything else.



and he's still here!



And yet still, I had that weird feeling. I never feel more "outside" than when I'm visiting battlefields. I have one more day here, and a lot more to think about.



I wish he'd stopped by the College to say "hey" and to find out how we overwhelmingly liberal overwhelmingly northerners get by in a town that fetishizes the gallantry of the Confederate invaders. Maybe he did stop by but nobody told me. Where are you now Ta-Nehisi? Wanna get a beer?