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

between the sections of our country known as North and South, and not as a war waged by the Government for the suppression of rebellion against National authority and meant to destroy National existence.” The casual reader “would not be able to distinguish between the patriotism of those who fought to save the Union and those who fought to destroy it,” much less to see in Confederate “patriotism” the protection of “slavery with its multiple of horrors.”37

Other veterans’ groups kept nailing the flag of emancipation to the mast as fast as the Lost Causers could tear it down. The Society of the Army of the Tennessee described the war as a struggle “that involved the life of the Nation, the preservation of the Union, the triumph of liberty and the death of slavery.” They had “fought every battle … from the firing upon the Union flag at Fort Sumter to the surrender of Lee at Appomattox … in the cause of human liberty,” burying “treason and slavery in the Potter’s Field of nations” and “making all our citizens equal before the law, from the gulf to the lakes, and from ocean to ocean.” In 1937, when the United Confederate Veterans extended an invitation to the GAR to join it in what amounted to the last great Blue and Gray Reunion at Gettysburg, the ninety-year-old veterans at the GAR’s 71st Encampment in Madison, Wisconsin, were adamant that no displays of the Confederate battle flag be permitted. “No rebel colors,” they shouted. “What sort of compromise is that for Union soldiers but hell and damnation.”38

But there was an even greater victory to remember, although it was a victory so thoroughgoing that it has become easy for subsequent generations to take it for granted, or even to discount it as a poor companion to emancipation, and that was the survival of the Union, and with it, liberal democracy in the nineteenth century. Goldwin Smith, on tour in America in 1864, said, “An English liberal comes here, not only to watch the unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own. … Your regeneration, when it is achieved, will set forth the regeneration of the European nations.” If a liberal democratic republic as successful as the American one had been turned on itself and fractured from pressures it had created, the rejoicing from every crowned head, every dictator, and every princeling would be heard around the planet. Certainly those crowned heads saw that this was the ultimate stake in the war. This is why so many of them were rooting for the Confederacy.39

It was also the principal reason why Frederick Douglass could never write off the war as casually as Du Bois would. Douglass, who fought virtually to his dying day in 1895 to keep the eyes of Americans fixed firmly on his vision of a war that had been fought for freedom and not just the Union, was just as firm in his insistence that achieving freedom would have had precious little significance unaccompanied by preservation of the Union. The two wars were so intertwined that no war for slavery could have succeeded without the war for the Union, and no war for the Union could have succeeded without becoming a war to end slavery. Like Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union,” the white veterans remembered their war as being for both union and emancipation, one and inseparable. “We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle,” Douglass declared in 1871, “and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.” He would have nothing of it.

I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my “right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict. If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans, which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed, and mutilated, which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves, and planted agony at a million hearthstones—I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?40

What Douglass wanted from the South was not reconciliation but repentance for the attempted assassination of the republic by the slaveholding aristocrats. “The South has a past not to be contemplated with pleasure, but with a shudder,” he wrote in 1870. “She has been selling agony, trading in blood and in the souls of men. If her past has any lesson, it is one of repentance and thorough reformation.” More than a decade later, Douglass was still not satisfied: “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.”41

In the case of Du Bois, the Beards, and those who have followed in their path, the Civil War approaches the nadir of total loss precisely because at some point they concluded that since liberal democracy was a dead end, an illusion, and never worth fighting for, intentionally or otherwise, the Civil War could never amount to more than a tragic failure. But because Americans in those same years strayed from the path they might have trod at the end of the war does not mean that the Civil War is merely a tragedy.

In 1886 the survivors of Battery B of the 1st New Jersey Artillery gathered together at Gettysburg with the other survivors of the 3rd Corps of the Army Potomac to stroll over the battlefield and visit the graves of the battery’s dead