THE CIVIL WAR
At the outbreak of war, what the Northerner saw confronting him was an
organized attempt to overthrow the government and break up the nation in
the interest of slavery. This as the essential fact took form in the
circle of fire let loose on a beleaguered fort, and the Stars and
Stripes lowered before an overwhelming force. Close following came the
menace against the national capital, for Washington was believed to be
in imminent peril. A Massachusetts regiment marching to its relief was
assailed by the populace of Baltimore; communication was cut; and the
city which was the centre and symbol of the national life seemed
stretching her hands in appeal to the country's faithful sons. To the
conscience, the heart, the imagination of the North, it was a war of
national self-defense,--a holy war.
What the Southerner saw was an attempt to crush by force a legitimate
exercise of the right of sovereign States to an independent existence.
The typical Southerner, whether he had thought Secession expedient or
not, believed that each State was the rightful judge of its own course,
that the citizen's first allegiance was due to his State; and that the
attempt at coercion was as tyrannical as the refusal by Great Britain of
independence to the American colonies. And, apart from all political
theories, there instantly loomed on the horizon the armies of the North,
bearing down with fire and sword on the people of the Southern States.
The instinct of self-defense, and the irresistible sympathy of
neighborhood and community, prompted to resistance. Beyond doubt, the
typical Southern volunteer could say in all sincerity, as one of them
has expressed it: "With me is right, before me is duty, behind me is
home."
So natural and profound was the motive on each side, when the war began.
Wholly different from the moral responsibility of those who initiated
Secession, is the case of those who afterward fought for what to each
side was the cause of home and country. But, driven though both parties
felt themselves to war, none the less terrible was the war in itself.
There are difficulties from which the only escape is through disaster.
John Morley writes: "It is one of the commonest of all cheap
misjudgments in human affairs, to start by assuming that there is always
some good way out of a bad case. Alas for us all, this is not so.
Situations arise, alike for individuals, for parties, and for States,
from which no good way out exists, but only choice between bad way out
and worse." For the American people, in the situation into which by sins
of commission and omission they had been brought, the only way out was
one of the worst ways that human feet can travel.
It does not belong to this work to give a history of the Civil War. But
a truthful history might be written in a very different vein from the
accepted and popular narratives. These for the most part describe the
conflict in terms resembling partly a game of chess and partly a
football match. We read of grand strategic combinations, of masterly
plans of attack and admirable counter-strokes of defense. On the
battlefield we hear of gallant charges, superb rushes of cavalry,
indomitable resistance. Our military historians largely give us the
impression of man in battle as in the exercise of his highest powers,
and war as something glorious in the experience and heart-thrilling in
the contemplation.
But a succinct account of the whole business would be to say that for
four years the flower of the country's population were engaged in
killing each other. All other industries were overshadowed by the
occupation of human slaughter. Shop and farm, church and college, school
and home, all were subsidiary to the battlefield.
The battlefield itself is not easily conceived by the civilian, even
with the aid of poets and story-tellers from Homer to Kipling. The
reader, who has perhaps never seen a shot fired in anger, may have
chanced to witness a man struck down in the street by a falling beam or
trampled by a runaway horse. Or, as a better illustration, he may
remember in his own case some hour of sudden and extreme suffering,--a
hand caught by a falling window, a foot drenched by scalding water.
Intensify that experience, extend it through days, for the home couch
and the nursing of mother or wife put the bare ground and the onrush of
hostile men,--and you have the nucleus, the constituent atom, of a
battle. Multiply it by hundreds or thousands; give to each sufferer the
background of waiting parents, wife, children, at home; give to a part
death, swift or agonizing; to another part lifelong infirmity or
irritation,--and you begin to get the reality of war.
It was Wellington who said that the worst sight on earth, next to the
field of defeat, was the field of victory. It was Lee who wrote from
Mexico to his son: "You have no idea what a horrible sight a
battle-field is." And he said that the strongest memory left from his
first battle was the plaintive tone of a little Mexican girl whom he
found leaning over a wounded drummer-boy.
Men not only witness such carnage but inflict it, in the excitement of
battle, because animated by feelings of which only a part can rightly be
called heroic. Honor indeed is due to the subordination of personal fear
to the sense of duty and comradeship,--yes, high honor; and the appeal
of the soldier to the imagination, as a type of self-sacrifice and
nobility, has its element of truth. But the ordinary courage of the
battle-field is largely an excitement half-animal, half-contagious,
running often into savagery and insensate fury. In that situation the
highest and lowest elements in man come into play. For the most part
only the highest is portrayed for us by the historians and
romancers,--they keep the wild beast and the devil out of sight. Only in
these later days, when mankind begins to scrutinize its boasted glories
more closely, do Tolstoi in literature and Verestchagin in art give us
glimpses of the grim reality.
An industry which has murder for its main output will have some
by-products to match. In the armies of both sides the human stuff was of
mixed character and motive. Some enlisted from pure patriotism,--for
Union, State, or Confederacy; some from thirst of adventure; others for
ambition; others for the bounty or under compulsion of the conscription
officer; many from the mere contagious excitement. Army life always
brings to many of its participants a great demoralization. Take away the
restriction of public opinion in a well-ordered community, take from men
the society of good women, and there will be a tendency to barbarism. A
civilized army has indeed a code and public opinion of its own, which
counts for some sterling qualities, but it is lax and ineffective for
much that goes to complete manhood. Just as the war left a host of
maimed and crippled, so it left a multitude of moral cripples. At the
reunion, around the "camp fire," with the reminiscences of stirring
times and the renewal of good comradeship runs a vein of comment which
the newspapers do not relate. "What's become of A.?" "Drank himself to
death." "And where is X.?" "Never got back the character he lost in New
Orleans,--went to the dogs." It is a chronicle not recorded on the
monuments, but remembered in many a blighted household. The financial
debt the war left behind it was not the heaviest part of the after-cost.
Nor must there be forgotten the temper which war begets, of mutual hate
between whole peoples. Forty years later we bring ourselves,--some of
us, and in a measure,--to see that our opponents of either side had some
justification or some excuse; that they perhaps were honest as we. But
little room was there for such mutual forbearance of judgment while the
fight was on. For the average man, for most men, to fight means also to
hate. While the contest lasted, Northerners habitually spoke of their
foes as "the rebels,"--not in contumely, but as matter-of-fact
description. They were "rebels" in common speech, and when one warmed a
little they were "traitors." Good men said that now for the first time
they saw why the imprecatory Psalms were written,--theirs was the only
cursing strong enough for the country's enemies. Quite as hearty was the
South's detestation of the Yankee invaders and despots,--the fanatics
and their hired minions. The Southern feeling took the keener edge,
because sharpened by the bitter fact of invasion and the hardships it
brought. With them the home suffered, not only as at the North, by the
departure of father or son to danger or death; the Southern homes often
saw the foes in their midst, and sometimes suffered ravage and spoil.
"How can you expect me to be well reconstructed," asked a Virginian
after the war, "When I remember the family vaults in which the silver
plates were wrenched from the coffins by your soldiers?" When the
fighting was over, the life of the reunited nation had to work its way
for a generation,--and the end is not yet,--against the hostilities, the
rancors, the misunderstandings, generated in those four years of
strife.
The reality of war where it fell heaviest,--in the border States, where
neighborhoods and families were divided, and both armies marched and
fought,--is touched by the graphic pen of a woman, Mrs. Rebecca Harding
Davis, who saw and felt a part of it: "The histories which we have of
the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid
misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up
to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Even
on the border, your farm was a waste, all your horses or cows were
seized by one army or the other, or your shop or manufactory was closed,
your trade ruined. You had no money; you drank coffee made of roasted
parsnips for breakfast, and ate only potatoes for dinner. Your nearest
kinsfolk and friends passed you on the street silent and scowling; if
you said what you thought you were liable to be dragged to the county
jail and left there for months. The subject of the war was never
broached in your home where opinions differed; but one morning the boys
were missing. No one said a word, but one gray head was bent, and the
happy light died out of the old eyes and never came to them again. Below
all the squalor and discomfort was the agony of suspense or the
certainty of death. But the parsnip coffee and the empty purse certainly
did give a sting to the great overwhelming misery, like gnats tormenting
a wounded man."
Visiting in war-time the sages of Concord, she saw the difference
between war as viewed by visionaries at a distance and the reality: "I
remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's
father as he chanted pæans to the war, the 'armed angel which was
wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.' We were in the
little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr.
Alcott stood in front of the fire-place, his long gray hair streaming
over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to
another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the
orotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated
before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with
profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his
arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing,
sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.
"I had come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the
filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate
camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and
glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well
improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for
honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an
armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the
slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who
listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my
cherry-tree time, when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders
debouching in the misty fields."
The youth who reads may ask in wonder, "And was then the war to which we
have been used to look back with exultation and pride,--was it but a
horror and a crime?" No; it was something other and more than that; it
had its aspects of moral grandeur and of gain for humanity; it was a
field for noble self-sacrifice, for utmost striving of men and deepest
tenderness of women, it had its heroes and martyrs and saints; it was in
the large view the tremendous price of national unity and universal
freedom. But in the exaltation of these better aspects, we have as a
people too much forgotten the other and awful side. That is what we need
now to be reminded of. For among our present dangers none is greater
than the false glorification of war. Against such glorifications stands
Sherman's word, "War is hell." And on that grand tomb with which our
greatest city crowns its proudest height is inscribed, as the one word
by which Grant forever speaks to his countrymen, "Let us have peace."
The nobler side of the war is told and will be told in many a history
and biography, romance and poem. In the broad view, the grandest fact
was that a multitude of men and women felt and acted as never before for
a cause greater than any personal gain. Under the discipline of
sacrifice and suffering, and with the personal horizon widened to take
in nations and races, a multitude on the field and at home grew to
loftier stature. The hardships and perils which wrecked some
strengthened others. The development of energy and resource was beyond
measure. The North created armies and navies; it organized a new system
of finance; it transformed a peaceful industrial community into an
irresistible military force; and all the while it carried on its
productive industries with scarcely visible shrinkage; farm and mill,
school and college, kept on with their work. The South made itself into
a solid army of resistance; cut off from its accustomed sources of
supply, it developed for itself all the essentials of material life; it
showed an ingenuity and resourcefulness beyond all expectation; and the
fidelity of its slaves supplied its armies with food while keeping its
homes secure. In peace haunted always by latent dread of insurrection,
in war the South found its servants its best friends. So, in both
sections, wonders were wrought and deeds never dreamed of were achieved.
In justly viewing the evil and the good of war, we must compare it with
other disturbances and catastrophes. The finest traits and highest
efficiency of men come out under disasters which yet it must be our
habitual effort to avert. It is the ship on the rocks, the theater on
fire, that shows the hero. But what should we think of one who ran a
ship on shore, or set fire to a theater, in order to call out heroism?
Exactly so are we to regard those who glorify war as in itself a fine
and admirable thing, a proper school and arena of manhood. The
refutation of such talk comes not so well from men of the church or
closet as from those who have drunk deepest of war's reality. A man of
exuberant vitality, whose personal delight in physical strife colors his
statesmanship, and who is exhilarated by the memory of a skirmish or two
in Cuba, may talk exultantly of "glory enough to go round," and preach
soldiering as a splendid manifestation of the strenuous life. But the
grim old warrior whose genius and resolution split the Confederacy like
a wedge, General Sherman, in the very midst of his task wrote to a
friend: "I confess without shame that I am sick and tired of the war.
Its glory is all moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant, is over
dead and mangled bodies, the anguish and lamentation of distant families
appealing to me for missing sons, husbands, and fathers. It is only
those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the
wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood,
more vengeance, more desolation."
One glance we here may give at the traits which against this dark
background shone with the light which redeems humanity. The worst scenes
of all were not on the battlefield but in the military prisons. At
Andersonville, and other points, thousands of Northern prisoners were
crowded together, with insufficient supply of unnutritious food, with
scanty and foul water; surrounded by harsh guards, quick to shoot if the
"dead line" was crossed by a foot; harassed by petty tyranny; starved,
homesick, diseased, dying like infected sheep. It is a black, black
page,--but let its blackness be mainly charged to war itself, and what
war always breeds. In Northern prisons, the rate of mortality was nearly
as high as in Southern; the work of hunger in the one was matched by
cold in the other. "All things considered," says J. F. Rhodes in his
impartial _History of the United States_, "the statistics show no reason
why the North should reproach the South. If we add to one side of the
account the refusal to exchange the prisoners"--a refusal based by Grant
at one time on the military disadvantage of restoring the Southern
prisoners to active service--"and the greater resources, and to the
other the distress of the Confederacy; the balance struck will not be
far from even." Enough for our present purpose that the Andersonville
prison-pen was a hell. Well, after a time the Union armies were
recruited by negroes, and the Confederates in resentment refused to
consider these when captured as prisoners of war, and would not include
them in the exchanges. Thereupon the Federal Government declared that
its negro soldiers must receive equal rights with the whites, and until
this was conceded there should be no exchange at all. Then some of the
Andersonville prisoners drew up a petition, and signed and sent it to
Washington, praying the government to hasten their release, and if
necessary to hold the question of negro prisoners for negotiation, while
pressing forward the liberation of its faithful and suffering white
soldiers. But promptly by others in the prison-pen a counter petition
was started, signed, and sent on. It ran in substance thus: "We are in
evil case, and we earnestly desire that you hasten our deliverance by
every means consistent with right and honor. But--honor first! Let the
nation's plighted faith to its black soldiers be kept, at whatever cost
to us. We ask you to still refuse all exchange of prisoners, until the
Õsame treatment can be secured for black and white." Was ever a braver
deed than that?
One picture more. In a military hospital at Washington, Walt Whitman was
engaged as a volunteer nurse. In a letter to a friend, he depicted in a
few sentences the tragedy of it all, and yet the triumph of the spirit
over the body and over death itself. He wrote of a Northern hospital,
but the like might be seen on Southern soil, as to-day among Russians or
Japanese,--it is the tragedy and triumph of humanity. "These thousands,
and tens and twenties of thousands, of American young men, badly wounded
... operated on, pallid with diarrhoea, languishing, dying with fever,
pneumonia, etc., open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights,
... showing our humanity ... tried by terrible, fearful tests, probed
deepest, the living souls, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty
bonds of art. To these, what are your dreams and poems, even the oldest
and the tearfulest?... For here I see, not at intervals, but quite
always, how certain man, our American man,--how he holds himself cool
and unquestioned master above all pains and bloody mutilation.... This,
then, what frightened us all so long! Why, it is put to flight with
ignominy--a mere stuffed scarecrow of the fields. Oh, death, where is
thy sting? Oh, grave, where is thy victory?"