Speaking to an audience in Richmond early in January, 1863, Jefferson Davis undertook to remind all southerners of the oppressive weight which a Northern conquest would inevitably bring to them. The weight was being felt, as he spoke, within much less than one hundred miles of the Confederate capital, and President Davis was eloquent about it.
“The Northern portion of Virginia,” he remarked, “has been ruthlessly desolated—the people not only deprived of the means of subsistence, but their household property destroyed and every indignity which the base imagination of a merciless foe could suggest inflicted without regard to age, sex or condition.”
That Mr. Davis had genuine evils to complain about is undeniable. Northern Virginia had known the harsh rule of General John Pope, and it had had even rougher treatment from undisciplined cavalrymen and straggling foot soldiers who overran towns and plantation houses with a casual rowdiness that was the essence of unstudied and unprovoked brutality. Yet the present generation, to its sorrow, has learned things about oppression which the generation of the 1860’s did not know. The armies of Germany and Russia have shown the hideous things that can happen when an invader really casts aside restraint and sets out to break a conquered people. The words, “every indignity which the base imagination of a merciless foe could suggest,” have a meaning now which President Davis, General Pope, and the wayward Union soldier could not possibly have imagined. By this time we have known foes who were genuinely and literally merciless and whose imaginations could descend to a depth of baseness not conceivable to the innocence of a century ago.
President Davis’ indignation, in short, was justified, but his language meant a great deal less in 1863 than it would mean today. We know now how far “the base imagination of a merciless foe” can go, and if we forget, there are plenty of people in places like Poland and the Ukraine who could refresh our memories. Seen in the light of things that happened overseas in the years after 1940, the American Civil War calls for a milder commentary than once seemed justified. It brought an abundance of cruelty and baseness upon the land, but they were not the cruelty and baseness which our generation has had to know about. Ben Butler, for example, was about as malodorous a governor of occupied territory as the Civil War produced, but he seems positively benign by comparison with military governors recently seen in Europe.
These meditations arise from a reading of Mr. Edmund Wilson’s newest book, Patriotic Gore, which is a discussion, by a most eminent literary critic, of the literature of the Civil War. (Not the literature about the war; Mr. Wilson concerns himself with material written by men and women who were actually in it, from Abraham Lincoln and U. S. Grant to Mary Chesnut and John W. De Forest.) In his introduction to this thoughtful and useful work Mr. Wilson remarks that he feels “under some obligation to explain to the reader in advance the general point of view which gives shape to my picture of the war.”
The war reminds him, to begin with, of one voracious sea slug swallowing another; a power struggle, pure and simple, which impels him to try “to remove the whole subject from the plane of morality and to give an objective account of the expansion of the United States.” Like Bismarck and Lenin, Abraham Lincoln was engaged in unifying a great power; like them he became an uncompromising dictator; and “each was succeeded by agencies which continued to exercise this power and to manipulate the peoples he had been unifying in a stupid, despotic and unscrupulous fashion, so that all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized, after his removal, in the most undesirable way.”
Thus, after the war, the Radical Republicans in Washington “added every form of insult and injury to the bitterness of the Confederate failure.” “We Americans have not yet had to suffer from the worst of the calamities that have followed on the dictatorships in Germany and Russia, but we have been going for a long time now quite steadily in the same direction.” This leads Mr. Wilson to ask: “In what way, for example, was the fate of Hungary, at the time of its recent rebellion, any worse than the fate of the South at the end of the Civil War?”
Now this, really, is the language of the i86o’s all over again, unmodified by afterknowledge. Did the Republican regime in Washington, after Lincoln’s death, really inflict upon the South “every form of insult and injury”—every form, as the business would be understood nowadays? There were no executions and there were no concentration camps or proscription lists or confiscation of estates. Within very little more than ten years the army of occupation was withdrawn, southerners ruled their own lives as they saw fit, and former Confederate generals took their seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The fate of Hungary was no worse than this?
It is of course perfectly true that the South remembers the Civil War with deep emotions; true also that the federal government’s recent attempt to enforce integration in schools has met with a great deal of resistance. But what on earth is one to make of this assertion?—"The truth is that the South since the Civil War, in relation to the Washington government, has been in a state of mind that has fluctuated between that of Hungary and that of the Ukraine in relation to the government of Moscow.”
Patriotic Gore, by Edmund Wilson. Oxford University Press. 816 pp. $8.50.
What is being talked about in this introduction is not literature but history, and it is worthwhile to see what kind of history is being expounded. It is the story, apparently, of one sea slug swallowing another. … We entered World War I, says Mr. Wilson, because of British propaganda, although “we might well by abstaining have shortened the war and left Europe less shattered and more stable.” We were “gradually and furtively” brought into the Second World War by Mr. Roosevelt, who appears to have maneuvered the Japanese into bombing Pearl Harbor—in about the same way, apparently, that Mr. Lincoln maneuvered the Confederacy into firing on Fort Sumter. Now we are in a cold war, and our problem is that we persist in attaching abstract values to it and refuse to recognize the whole tragic affair as a business of sea slugs.
As noted above, Mr. Wilson begins by promising to explain his general point of view and to give an objective account of the regrettable unpleasantness of the i86o’s. The point of view is clearly set forth, but the “objectivity” is that of The Debunker: the most impassioned and pontifical objectivity you are likely to meet in a long, long time.
Negro’s Viewpoint
By BRUCE CATTON
For relief, turn to another treatment. In Lincoln and the Negro, Mr. Benjamin Quarles discusses one poignant aspect of the Civil War which cannot easily be reduced to terms of sea slugs: the business of the Negroes who lived just below the ladder’s bottom rung when the war began and who found in the war, in spite of all the odds, a chance to start climbing.
Mr. Quarles has a point of view of his own, the substance of which apparently is that what people think about an action taken—what they feel deep in their hearts, what they respond to with their blood and muscles and their dreams—may in the end mean even more than the action itself; may in fact transfigure the action and make it contain more than the actor himself originally meant. It may, finally, confound the mathematics of the pundit who adds two and two together and finds that the answer cannot possibly be anything greater than a meager four.
He concerns himself here, chiefly, with the Emancipation Proclamation.
Any way you look at it, here was a very odd document. It represented the very least that a wartime President (concerned, somehow, that the war which was costing so many lives ought to be a little bit more than a matter of one slug swallowing another) could do about the terrible issue of human slavery. It was a timid pronunciamento, an attempt to carry water on both shoulders, a politician’s halfhearted stab at seeming to do something without actually doing it. It ordained that slaves would be free in precisely those areas where the Federal government lacked power to enforce its edict; where the Federal government was in full control, with marshals and courts and great ranks of soldiers to make the writ good, slavery was left untouched. It even permitted the states which had seceded to retain their slaves if they would just come back into the Union in three months’ time. Altogether, as Mr. Quarles points out, it “sounded like a cross between a military directive and a lawyer’s brief.” It was an instrument of developing war policy, nothing more or less, coldly conceived and attaining eloquence only because its central paragraph ended with the words “forever free.” It would mean as much, or as little, as the government tried to make it mean.
A fraud, then, offering nothing of consequence to a luckless pawn? (To Mr. Wilson, the contemplated destruction of slavery was “the rabble-rousing moral issue which is necessary in every modern war to make the conflict appear as a melodrama.") It might have gone that way—except that the Negroes themselves, who after all had the most direct stake in the matter, believed it. Believing it, they turned the Emancipation Proclamation into one of the most powerful and significant utterances any American President has ever made.
Mr. Quarles emphasizes that the Negroes were not being deceived. They knew that the edict of September 22, 1862, was “little more than the declaration of an intention,” and that there was “nothing in custom or in law” that could force the President to follow it up. But they believed in it, and believed in it so fervently that—as Mr. Quarles puts it—the Proclamation “changed the whole tone and character of the war.” They saw it before Lincoln himself did, and their belief had much to do with the fact that it quickly took on “the evocative power reserved only for the halfdozen great charter expressions of human liberty in the entire Western tradition.”
Not the least of the people on whom this faith had its full effect was Lincoln himself. In the long weeks between his issuance of the preliminary Proclamation, just after the Battle of Antietam, and the final proclamation in January, 1863, Lincoln appears to have wavered. He was not quite sure, even then, or for that matter a good deal later. On July 31, 1863, after Gettysburg and Vicksburg had underlined his final authority, he wrote, broodingly: “I think I shall not retract or repudiate it,” quite as if the matter were still up for final decision. But he stayed with it, partly because the people in bondage had taken him at his word.
How could he do otherwise? Mr. Quarles recites the familiar story about the gang of ex-slaves who were working for the quartermaster corps at a Federal army outpost in South Carolina while the war was still on. They were talking about Lincoln and what he had done and might yet do, and one white-haired patriarch interrupted them sternly by saying: “What do you know ‘bout Massa Linkum? Massa Linkum be ebrewhere. He walk de earth like de Lord.” No man can swim against that sort of current. The doubt and hesitation which are only partly hidden beneath the long, lawyerlike phrases of the Proclamation at last fell away, and Lincoln finally confessed that his issuance of this document “was the one thing that would make people remember that he had lived.”
The thing of course had immediate practical effects. For one point, it got Negroes into the United States Army, which automatically made slavery a dead duck forever after. (You do not, after all, return to slavery—or even, permanently, to second-class citizenship—a man who has worn his country’s uniform and endured battle for it.) For another, it gave the Negro the feeling that he had a stake in America and in all that America might mean. “As the war moved toward its close,” says Mr. Quarles, “the Negro’s sense of identity with the land of his birth grew deeper, nourished anew by its source—Abraham Lincoln.”
This takes us a certain distance away from the resolute conviction that the Civil War meant nothing more than a power struggle between two greedy imperialisms. It was that, to be sure, and it is easy enough to recite the manifold uglinesses that it brought in its train. But although Mr. Wilson can point out that when the federal government uses troops to get Negro children into schools, southerners “remember the burning of Atlanta, the wrecking by Northern troops of Southern homes, the disfranchisement of the governing classes and the premature enfranchisement of the Negroes,” it still remains to be asked: What do the Negroes remember? Let Mr. Quarles answer:
Lincoln and the Negro, by Benjamin Quarles. Oxford University Press. 275 pp. $6.50.
“Because freedom is a deep river, Negroes would prefer to cross over in a calm time. But cross over they must, being Americans. And the Negroes of the Civil War years and after could find strength for the struggle by reflecting upon the life of a man who, on the threshold of his career, had said that this nation could not endure half slave and half free; a man who, at the midpoint of his presidency, had called upon his generation to highly resolve that America should have a new birth of freedom; and a man who, as the unseen shadows gathered around him, had exhorted his countrymen to strive on to finish the great work they were in.”
Dream on, H. M. Small
By BRUCE CATTON
There are many kinds of inventors. One is the heralded, or no-one-is-laughing-at-themany-longer, variety, like Edison, Elias Howe, and the Wright Brothers. Then there are the heralded-for-something-else inventors, like Mark Twain, who devised a new kind of scrapbook, or Lillian Russell, who patented an improved trunk. (Her own scarcely needed any improvement.) But there is, alas, a sad, forgotten group, the inventors of useful and clever devices that never quite catch on. Some of the splendid ideas of these unsung geniuses are shown here in patent drawings picked out from a recent booklet on patents published by E. I. da Pont de Nemours & Company, where they know a good deal about the subject.
Consider the brilliant notion, at top, of H. M. Small; if the railroads cared, it would still be a good idea, as any tired commuter knows. Or Joseph Fallek’s grapefruit shield; because no one listened, this mischievous fruit is still taking its annual toll at the national breakfast table. Nor is it too late to this very day for the President of the United States to snap up one of Clark’s rocking-chair churns. It would not only relieve executive tensions, it would also help out around the White House.
