At a sesquicentennial distance the Civil War can become too
easy to romanticize. We can be tempted
to envision some charm in it. From a
prolonged study of the Civil War, via many sources and a variety of formats, I find
little romance in it. The brutality and
misery of that war have not been overstated.
Fortunately, there was work that was noble and heroic, such as the
ending of slavery.
A more peaceful solution, in hindsight, was available and
likely, as the operation of the Constitution was steadily bringing about. Perhaps it took a civil war challenge to that
Constitution to make people recognize—the slaveholders especially—that a
peaceful end to bondage would have been preferable. Abraham Lincoln, a casualty of the war, perceived
in a few words at the Gettysburg commemoration, that the Civil War was “testing
whether [our] nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure.”
To what conception and dedication did Lincoln refer? “A new nation, conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.”
It must be understood that Lincoln observed that this nation
had not fully achieved those principles.
He called it “unfinished work.”
Building on how well that work had begun, Lincoln praised how far it had
been “so nobly advanced.” Our nation, conceived
in liberty, embraced a dedication to which our Founders bound themselves and their
posterity, to achieve the proposition that each of us was created equal. As the price in blood and suffering mounted,
he was asking whether such a dedicated nation, still in its adolescence, could continue.
Through the 21 months following Gettysburg, the price would
grow higher and more horrid while the people of that day persevered and
demonstrated that the nation would endure, as it has to our day. Further headway was made to fulfill our founding
principles.
Today is a time for our dedication to be tested, as such a nation
will always be. Loud, magnified voices—there
were those in Lincoln’s day demanding to end the effort (he nearly lost his
reelection to some who preferred a compromise with the slavocrats)—today parade
the obvious that our nation has not yet achieved all of our Founders’ ideals, and
so demand that we abandon those ideals.
They prescribe a return to the age old pattern whereby in
exchange for our liberty the self-selected few are elevated to mold the rest, prescriptions
that somehow end up profiting the new bosses.
As in the past, while dressed in varieties of costumes, the chieftains, kings,
czars, fuehrers, commissars, and other ugly monsters reshape societies that eventually
devolve into ruin.
Their “modern” strategy is similarly old: divide and conquer. Rhetorical crossbows aim darts first at the
failings of the very human Founders, to whom they assign blame for anyone
unhappy with himself. Next they guide their
unhappy victims against our founding ideal, “the proposition that all men are
created equal.” Their bizarre assertion
is that any failure in the ideal’s complete achievement justifies its trashing,
the more violently the better. Upon the
ruins of civil disorder, disunion, and violence, they would build in the name
of “equity” where they have destroyed fundamental equality.
That is the program of those positioned to claim to be more
equal than others while they rake in a bigger share of the proposed “equity.” It is all old naked ugliness when denuded of
the costumes. In time it has always
failed, but not without putrid fruits of misery.
