Raintree County, pp. 493-6.
--War, said
the Perfessor, is the most monstrous of all human illusions.
All ideals worth anything are worth not fighting for.
--War, gentlemen, the Senator said,
is one of the world's necessary evils. This nation grew
strong through battle. The Civil War was the college in
which the young men of this country learned how to do big things.
--War is just plain killing, the
Perfessor said. You understand, I'm not sentimental about
it. God knows, unless we drew a little blood now and then,
there wouldn't be room on the globe for us all. What's
pitiful is how men murder each other and then glorify the crime
in song and story. The real issues of the Civil War always
seemed simple to me. The Civil War was fought quite simply
because some men are darker than others. In a way both
North and South were fighting the Negro--the South to keep him
a slave and productive, the North to keep him from being too
productive, which meant making him free.
--There's a lot of truth in that,
the Senator said. No use pretending that either side fought
the War on moral grounds. Two economic systems were pitted
against each other--railroads against cotton. When I changed
over and became a Republican, it was in recognition of that fact.
Economically, the South was behind the times. This
country was meant to be one Nation, one big industrial and political
bloc. It was Fate, and the South had to give in to Fate--and
the bigger battalions.
--The Civil War, Mr. Shawnessy
said, was fought because man will be free. Both sides fought
it as a holy war.
--But you see, John, the Perfessor
said, you and I were part of the War, and we can't get away from
its fine old fervors. All that cant about Liberty and Union
was part of our youth, and a man will cling to as much youth
as he can. But was it so important after all that a certain
hunk of the earth be called by one name instead of two? Which
side fought for God and the Right? Well, I'll tell you.
God doesn't care about these things. God was quite untroubled
by the Great American Civil War. God, the God of Nature,
is a great brute impulse. He laughs at our romantic ideals
of love and war. I tell you, John, the farmboys went out
and died merely because they had the goddam rotten luck to be
born on one side or other of a river. There's no absoluteness
in these things. War is neither moral nor immoral, just
as life is neither moral nor immoral. War simply happens
to men, they're blind victims of it, it's a clash of forces ruthless
and natural, like the unconscious strife between the dinosaurs
and the little early mammals who ate their eggs and destroyed
them. Only our everlasting glorification of the individual
make us believe in the epic heroism of war. We get completely
lost in a swirl of proper nouns. Sumter, Fredericksburg, Antietam,
Gettysburg, Lincoln, Lee, Sherman, Grant, Washington, Richmond,
the 134th Indiana Volunteers, the March to the Sea, Shiloh, Vicksburg--what
are all these names? Words only, I assure you. All
this is simply the romantic human being trying to deny that he's
an animal. It's because we all try so hard to be immortal
and distinguish ourselves from every other individual who ever
lived that we have so much sorrow and so much poetry. We'd
be happier if we practiced the same ethics toward ourselves that
we do toward flies. What is the death of one hundred thousand
flies? Just a natural phenomenon. A fly is not an individual.
A fly is simply the representative of a species. No
one but that sentimental sap, Uncle Toby, cares about what happens
to a fly.
--Perhaps the fly himself dimly
resents it, Mr. Shawnessy put in.
--But, the Perfessor continued,
the death of a million men in a series of bloody explosions and
stinking camps is called the Civil War and each man is lamented
and remembered for a time, and people have banquets for fifty
years, and Congress votes pensions, and schoolboys recite the
Gettysburg Address. But sub specie aeternitatis,
this is all nothing. Strictly speaking, there is no past.
That which no longer is never was. Events, as you
say, John, are something that never happened. The dead
are simply nowhere. The new generations will look back
on the Civil War with great calm. It's hard to feel sorry
for folks who died a hundred years ago.
--The Civil War, Mr. Shawnessy
said, drawing a deep breath and weighing his
words, was fought for the Republic--or what Lincoln called the
Union. The Republic transcends boundaries, triumphs over
space. In America, a man not only possesses his home and
his local gods, but he possesses the Republic, which is a denial
of tribal boundaries and tribal prejudice. The Republic
is the symbol of man's victory over the formless earth. It may
be an illusion, but to be human is to accept human illusions,
which were created by centuries of struggle. This Republic
is, in Lincoln's phrase, the last, best hope of earth.
It affirms that a portion of America--this earth discovered,
adorned, and named by human labor--shall not be the property
of a single generation to wrest it away and shape it to new things
at will. The North didn't fight through a desire to acquire
the South, to possess it, to invade it, to enslave it. They
didn't even fight to destroy slavery within it. They fought to
preserve the republic, a mystical concept that affirms the humanity
of man. The Southerners threatened to destroy the Republic
on a point of inhumanity--the perpetuation of slavery. Thus
their moral position was hopelessly weak from the start. The
ante-bellum South was a proud, feudal, voluptuous dream. In
their blind way, the Southerners imagined that they too fought
for freedom. But it was freedom to enslave other human
beings. Their so-called right was not the world's right
nor humanity's right. Thus a war came to be, in which the
North was lucky to find great moral leadership in the person
of Lincoln, while the South--significantly--found great military
leadership in Robert E. Lee. As a series of physical facts,
we know how terrible the War was. As a series of Moral
Events, it was necessary and even sublime. It had to be
fought and won for the future of humanity. If the Civil
War had been lost by the North or had never been fought at all,
Balkanization of the American Republic would have resulted, and
the last, best hope of earth would have been lost for a time.
--Will you philosophers pardon
me while I do a little vulgar politicking, the Senator said,
raising to greet an approaching delegation.
--Well, said the Perfessor, this
may all be true. But what of the martyrs who fought and
died for this noble dream, the Union? Where are the young
men who died in the first battles? Where are the heroes
of First Bull Run? For them--and forever--
1861-- 'ALL'S --1863
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