Do not get me wrong, though. I am not one to weep over the tragedy of the Lost Cause. I understand and revile completely the unfettered evil that prompted that war. And let us not mince words here. It was about one thing only. Reasons for the war are complicated and not of a singular dimension, no, but it did boil down to one thing. I am a firm believer in the rights of individual states and also understand that peculiar Southern viewpoint that one's home state ranks as high or higher in the heart as one's country. But the fact of the matter is that the rights and the way of life that were defended by the South during that war were morally unconscionable. No questions in my mind about that.
What I am one to weep over is the unimaginable tragedy of the war itself. We still easily comprehend the magnitude of suffering that occurred with the deaths of thousands of Americans on one day in September eleven years ago. The Civil War was fought 150 years ago, though, and so perhaps it is not as readily considered that thousands of Americans died on such a scale as 9/11 in a matter of hours during that war--on many days and over the course of four long years. Over 600,000 American lives wiped away. That number is so large as to be beyond the realm of complete comprehension. Part of the tragedy of it all, though, is that it had to happen. It had to happen to do so many things: to finish our revolution, to answer the questions avoided in the creation of the Constitution, to prove that our great experiment could work, to validate our claim as human beings to certain natural rights and to liberty itself, to solidify our sense of what it means to be American, and, most important of all, to make certain that it could never happen again.
Shelby Foote, the late and preeminent Civil War historian, who became a bit of a sensation after the release of Ken Burns' documentary, says at one point in the film that because it is America's civil war, then of course we must think of it as the greatest war ever fought with the greatest generals to ever live leading the greatest armies to ever walk the earth fighting the greatest battles to ever have been waged. It is singularly an American kind of perspective and one that I admittedly share. It is also a bit of a Southern perspective to dwell on our civil war a bit, even today and for many reasons. I grew up in Virginia, site of so many key battles and, of course, seat of the Confederacy, and I was lucky enough as a child to have people in my life who thought it important to take me to visit all the great battlefields in our grand commonwealth and to understand what happened at those places and the hallowed ground under my feet and the enormity of the blood shed on that ground. I have walked also the fields at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and Sharpsburg in Maryland. I have had many moving moments in the early morning hours in my life, but one that remains clear to me is the early morning I ran a marathon at Chickamauga Battlefield in north Georgia, right outside of Chattanooga. It is a relatively small event as marathons go these days and there was time for much solitary contemplation. The fog rolling across that quiet landscape as the sun began to bathe us with its warmth, the monuments and cannon peeking out from the mist, reminded me of the sanctity of what had taken place there.
Foote also remarks that one has to admire someone who is willing to give their life for what they believe, even if that belief is not shared. In the end, those who died for the Southern cause in the Civil War were still Americans. I do not honor the Southern cause, but I do honor the Southern men who died such horrible deaths. I honor their valor. I admire their sense of honor, the one that has been nearly lost to us today. They were mostly fighting what they saw as an invasion of their homeland. And, I do also love the South as a place. I love it completely, the good, the bad, and the ugly of it. I love it also as my home. (For a truly sublime and lyrical book that is the best expression of the complex and haunting place that is the Southland, please add Ben Robertson's classic Red Hills and Cotton to your reading list. I have included it on my list of Shipwreck Books.)
Shiloh, 1862 is distinctive for its personal stories of what happened over the course of those two days in western Tennessee almost exactly 150 years ago. Groom draws from so many letters and memoirs of both ordinary soldiers and of those whose names we all know. I am curious to know where Groom ranks among historians. He is, after all, the novelist who gave us Forrest Gump. This book is certainly more accessible than most historical books and it reads at a faster pace and with less minute detail than a more academically inclined work. It does not, however, sugarcoat the ghastly and gruesome carnage that happened at Shiloh. In fact, Groom's use of the personal recollections give the reader a powerful sense of what it must have been like in the heat and fire of the battle, in the midst of so much awful death. To think of what terrible things humans are capable of doing to one another. There is, as example, quite a bit shared from Ambrose Bierce, who was serving as a Union infantryman and who later became an American literary giant. A particularly poignant description of the battle from him reads,
"the battle became a 'dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some great animal below the horizon . . . the air was full of thunder and the earth was trembling beneath [our] feet. Below us ran the river, vexed with plunging shells and obscured in spots by blue sheets of low-lying smoke.'"
In April of 1862, near the Shiloh church, named for the Hebrew word that means, of all things, "place of peace," Americans inflicted more casualties upon one another than they had suffered at the hands of foreign enemies in all previous wars combined up to that point. The first Battle of Manassas showed the country that the conflict would not be resolved quickly, but Shiloh showed clearly what the cost in blood would be.
"Nothing like it had ever happened before in the Western Hemisphere, and the Northern people's initial elation at a great Union victory soon turned to shock, and then to outrage, as the casualty lists came in. For Grant, it was the end of a grand illusion . . . he had convinced himself that a Union victory in a single great battle would cause the Confederacy to dissolve. However, after Shiloh, he reversed himself entirely with the stark conclusion that the Union could be restored only by the total conquest and subjugation of the South."
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