Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

when the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, following the battle at Gettysburg, arranged for the reburial of Gettysburg dead in a new cemetery at the center of the battlefield. Lincoln was invited by the organizers to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” at the dedication ceremonies in Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. He was not the featured speaker—that honor went to the former president of Harvard, Edward Everett, who launched into an oration two and a half hours long—and he needed to do no more in his remarks than is done when a bottle of champagne is cracked over a ship’s bow at its launch. He was respectful enough of the scope of that assignment to limit himself to only 272 words. In those words, Lincoln nevertheless managed to justify the ways of democracy more eloquently than anyone, then or now.71

Lincoln reached in his first sentence to the Declaration of Independence for authority: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” By “equal” he meant not a predetermined result but rather an equal starting point in the eyes of law and government, a common point from which any man could make himself. The idea that a nation could be founded on a proposition was ludicrous to the Romantic reactionaries of nineteenth-century Europe, and they were not reluctant to point to the Civil War as proof that attempting to build a government around something as bloodless and logical as a proposition was futile. Lincoln accepted that challenge: the war indeed would be the test of whether “that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure,” or whether democracies, wobbling around on the stilts of a proposition about equality, were doomed to self-destruction the moment a sizable minority decided it had no desire to abide by the will of a majority’s decision. The sacrifices of Gettysburg, Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chancellorsville, and a hundred other places demonstrated otherwise, that men would die rather than lose hold of that proposition. Reflecting on that dedication, the living should themselves experience a new birth of freedom, a determination—and he drove his point home with a deliberate evocation of the great Whig orator Daniel Webster—“that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”72

The Republican newspapers heartily applauded it: the address was a “brief but immortal speech,” editorialized John W. Forney’s Philadelphia Press. The Democratic papers, predictably, spurned it as “mere trash” and “unworthy of comment.”73

Southern intellectuals had a very different task: to demonstrate that the South really was a cultural world unto itself. Offering up the proof of a unique Southern cultural identity would make it easier to justify a separate Southern political regime, and that would build consensus behind the battle lines and shore up popular support for the Confederate government, even when that government undertook policy initiatives, from military conscription to economic nationalization, which seemed to contradict the immediate reasons the Southern states had seceded from the Union in the first place. By discovering and revealing the outlines of a distinctively Southern culture, Confederate intellectuals would create the rock around which the changing tides of war would splash in vain.

They certainly had the appetite for this task. Although the South had fewer resources to support them and fewer magazines and quarterlies for platforms, an intellectual network based on James Henry Hammond and William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, Henry Hughes of Mississippi, Josiah Clark Nott of Alabama, and the Virginians Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, Thomas Roderick Dew, George Fitzhugh, and George Frederick Holmes provided the backbone of Southern intellectual life. It also embraced the novelists Augusta Jane Evans, Caroline Gilman, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (the uncle of Confederate general James Longstreet), and John Pendleton Kennedy, the poets Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Hamilton Hayne. Their writing crowded into the four principal Southern journals, the Southern Quarterly Review, DeBow’s Review, the Southern Literary Messenger, and the Southern Review.74

Southern intellectuals tapped the energy of a long-festering resentment at the condescension shown them in the prewar decades by Northern publishers and editors. “The true gentleman was educated at a Northern college, wore clothing made at the North or imported by the North, employed a Northern teacher, male or female, listened to a Yankee parson, and read Northern books, magazines and newspapers,” complained DeBow’s Review in the heady summer of 1861. “We have been in a state of pupilage, and never learned to walk alone.” If only Southerners would shake off this Yankee-induced “pupilage,” they would realize that they actually possessed a distinct and self-defining culture of their own. This culture was built upon the fundamental (and Romantic) realization that nations are made not by adherence to propositions but by the cultivation of an ineluctable but palpable national character.75

The great error of the Enlightenment was that (as Thomas Dew explained in 1853) in their enthusiasm for reason, “the philosophers and encyclopaedists published their theories and principles without daring to apply them. … Their investigations, consequently, became eminently Utopian. Every principle was pushed out to its greatest extent,—the speculation of the philosopher was not hampered at each step by the difficulty of practical application. These abstract speculations were like theoretic mechanics, who sit in their closets and contemplate diagrams and figures, representing levers, pulleys, &c, with all the accuracy of mathematic precision.” The result, of course, was that when “the French revolution came, and the evils of government were at last to be corrected, unfortunately for France, there was nothing but this Utopian philosophy to shed light on the path of the revolution,” and the result was not government of, by or for the people, but the Reign of Terror.76

Rather than worship reason, Southerners “accept as true the faith of our fathers, believe in the authority of the Bible, attested by the voice of the civilized world for almost two thousand years; heed and respect the lessons of history, ancient and profane, and