... Studying history serves democracy by highlighting contingencies: Things did not need to turn out the way they did; choices matter. Since Hegel, Marx and other 19th-century philosophers decided that history is History — a proper noun, an autonomous force unfolding an inner logic — humanity has been told that vast, impersonal forces dictate events, nullifying human agency.
But they don’t. Choices matter. They certainly did during the first three days of July 1863 at the town of 2,390 people seven miles north of the Mason-Dixon line. In “Intruder in the Dust,” William Faulkner famously invoked the tantalizing power of possibility:
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence. . . . That moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself.”
But Lee's gamble failed at the decisive moment and, inexorably, the South's fate was sealed. Without those three days in July of 1863, slavery might still exist and Lincoln would never had the opportunity to utter those few words that now, as Stanton put it, "belong to the ages." As in the Rubayat, "the moving finger writes and having writ, moves on."
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