The American Civil War - A Personal Reflection

I find  the American Civil war  fascinating for many, many reasons.

It was a Civil War.  This meant that brother was truly set against brother.  Men on the eastern United States had to choose which side to fight on, and many families were divided for any number of reasons.  In the West, as Mark Twain found,  life could go on, pretty much as life went on at home in the First World War, oblivious to the suffering of men engaged in war.

It was a war fought over a relatively small part of the country.  I was surprised looking at a map, how near the war came to Washington, and reading Team of Rivals: Abraham Lincoln’s Political Genius  showed me just how worried they were that Washington would fall to the secessionists.

 Also because in many ways it prefigured many of the horrors of combat from the following  century.  The American Civil war initiated trench warfare; and the sight of some prisoners of war resemble survivors of concentration camps. (http://powcampscivilwar.blogspot.com/) Indeed, the word Deadline comes from the Civil War– soldiers guarding prisoners were ordered to shoot any prisoners crossing an imaginary line.   Although the machine gun was yet to be invented, advances in the technology of weapons production meant that often rifles were used instead of muskets, with greater range, accuracy and force, which in turn meant that sending massed troops against a fixed point was a stupid waste of human life – if First World War generals had studied the lessons of this war, they might not have wasted human life as they did.   At sea, iron clad ships routed wooden warships. Mechanized warfare clearly had not been imagined, but far from being the heavy weapons of medieval warfare, the role of the cavalry had significantly diminished. Sherman’s march into the heartland of the South wreaked a trail of destruction which is apparently is still talked of in southern families – much as the English Highland Clearances in Scotland generations later – and prepares us for the wholesale targeting of civilians which happened during the  bombing campaign of  cities Second World War . The images of destruction are still painful to see – reminiscent of so many images we have seen subsequently, but never before had the horrors of war been laid bare so publicly.

 

 

These  advances in the technology of photography also meant it was typical of soldiers to be photographed in uniform before going off to war,  and also for photographers to visit the battlefield. So we have hundreds and hundreds of images  of  soldiers, the battles they fought, and  the effects of battle.  Photographers learnt to ‘compose’ their image, even if it meant moving bodies to achieve a more poignant image (insert) 

 War promotes rhetoric.  This war prompted one of the most moving speeches ever recorded. I first came across it from the lips of a Ghanaian man, working nights as a security officer in London, who had had to memorise it as a child in school in Ghana.  It says something about the provincialism of an English education that I had not met it up to that point, and yet it has the majesty and strength of Shakespeare and the Bible, and is a touchstone for any true lover of democracy. Abraham Lincoln, at the height of the war, gave a short speech at the graveyard where so many of the Gettysburg dead had been buried.  The previous speaker had spoken for over two hours.

Lincoln stood and said: 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth

For this,ultimately, is what fascinates me about this conflict: it  was a clash of ways of seeing the world embedded in completely different ways of life. The south, with its antebellum, gentlemanly ideal, based around the slave- worked plantation, was faced by on industrial power based on free labour.  It was more than north versus south, industrial versus rural:  it was a true test of slave economy  versus free. Virginia was settled essentially by families from the south of England, wanting to recreate their lives of ease and leisure based upon the efforts of others. For this, they needed slaves.  And thus the notion of slavery entered the American continent – and this was the central issue around which the Civil War was fought.

History, of course, is always re-written by each generation and as a professional historian myself I am fascinated by those issues where scholars disagree and consensus seems impossible to reach. But approaching this subject anew with the producers of this series brought home to me the fact that these areas of disagreement are really about details – on the really big questions, scholars are now in complete agreement. None of the historians we spoke to for these programmes – and no others that we could have found – dispute the fact that the war was caused, fundamentally, by slavery (although they disagree vehemently about precisely how slavery caused the war).

There were other issues, to be sure, that agitated northerners and southerners in the years leading up to the war, but all are related pretty directly to slavery. Slavery was not the prime motivation for most northern soldiers when the war began, but most of them came to the view that in order to end the rebellion and prevent such treason from happening again, slavery had to be uprooted. Most southern soldiers were not slaveholders and they were fighting for hearth and home, yet the society of which they were a part depended on slavery. It was bound up into their way of understanding the world. So there is no getting away from slavery as the core issue – its role in creating the circumstances in which war could happen and the way in which it shaped the way the war unfolded.

(BBC website – my emphasis - and Quakers from the South tell me that this is not the history taught to them; nor is it the story Southerners tell themselves - see :

http://reason.com/archives/2001/08/01/southern-nationalism )

The South echoed the world of the English Cavalier world  which gave rise to it: a world of privilege, class and effortless achievement based on the work of others.   The north was essentially, however imperfectly,  based on the democratic values of free men and women choosing their own government, freely offering their labour.  To this extent, it could be argued that the American Civil War   was a continuation of some the issues and values of the English Civil War, which culminated in the execution of the King for treason in 1649. 

In the  England of the 1650's, for a very brief time, it appeared that ideas could be a valid currency for all men and women, and such remarkable ideas as a more inclusive voting system, regular parliaments and   the distribution of land as the  means of  production were seen as an essential part of the human condition (see The World Turned Upside Down – Radical ideas During the English Revolution – Christopher Hill; The Covenant Crucified – Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism – Douglas  Gwyn).  The Restoration of 1660 suppressed dissent, and the free exchange of ideas; it restored hierarchy, and with it rank and power in the hands of a few, based on the possession of wealth.  Once again the English became subjects, not citizens, and seem remarkably content to remain so. 

But these radical ideas refuse to be subdued, surfacing again and again in English (the Scots and the Welsh generally being more egalitarian than the English) History– the Chartists, and the history of the rise of Trade Union are two examples.  Arguably, Britain after the Second World War instituted many of the reforms which a modern democracy needs to function – I sense that there was a feeling on all sides that we were genuinely all in it together:  evacuees from industrial heartlands to middle-class families demonstrated the vast inequalities which existed in pre-war Britain; politicians of all colours had seen that a people acting together, with clear government direction could achieve huge things.  There was a sense that we could achieve a fairer, more decent society for all, and that government had an important role to play in that.

These assumptions were undermined by Mrs. Thatcher and her government in Britain in 1979 – as we came to the end of the generation of politicians who had served in the war.  Even more consistently, by Ronald Reagan on this side of the Atlantic.   The left of centre has not yet found a compelling counter narrative to market forces, unlimited choice and consumer driven ideology “There is no such thing as society – there are only individual men and women and families”………………. 

America is not a society at ease with itself. Our fellow Friend in Residence, Marianne, speaks movingly of her adolescence growing up in small town Kansas after the Second World War – a time of innocence, plenty, and boundless possibility.  Little of this America survives. America has shipped many jobs abroad – Apple creates the technology in America, but manufactures in China.   That is one reason why America has shrunk, evidence of which is all around us - its cars are smaller, its people struggling to make ends meet: even people on reasonable salaries struggle to meet college fees, health insurance, and save for retirement.  But this hollowing out of the industrial base is a result of policies framed in the Reagan/Thatcher era,  as are the decisions which have made average Americans poorer, to the benefit of the very, very rich.  The Right has successfully framed the discussion so that taxation is a dirty word, symptomatic of governmental failure and intrusion into the rights of the individual (see George Lakoff - http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml )  The Tea Party, with its demands for minimal central government,  is echoing the cry of the American south.  There are those who would argue that what the American Right are trying to achieve is an undermining of all that was achieved in the 20^th century in terms of enabling poor people to have a voice. And in America, poor people are often black people.

There will be another blog at some point in the future about America and race.  For now, it needs to be noted that African Americans had to wait one hundred years for the implications of their emancipation to begin to emerge.  Not until the huge civil rights struggles of the 60’s, did a Democratic President enacted laws which brought home the fruits of the Republican President Abraham Lincoln.

It is one of the great "What ifs...." of history what might have happened had Lincoln not been assassinated, and  his leadership had been allowed to dominate the peace, as it did the war

But......as I indicated in the previous blog, the Civil War defined America, and is arguably still defining America today.

And what has all this to do with us Quakers – pacifists?  What role Quakers and politics?

It seems to me that Quakers are in the world, but not of the world.  We should care passionately about the kind of society in which our fellow citizens are required to live their lives. We should hold our democratically elected politicians to account, and expect of them that they pursue policies which are just and equitable.   However, at root our role in the world is not to be a pressure group, or adjunct to a political party  despite what some well meaning journalists might think:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/28/quakers-religion-dawkins-sign-up?INTCMP=SRCH)   Our role is to model a different way of being, in which conflict is not ignored, but neither is it settled by war; in which difference is not met by exclusion, but by welcome; in which ways of life are sustainable and healthy, not consuming and greedy. Our role is to show what the beatitudes look like in the twentieth century, and offer a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven not as an abstract reality, but as a concrete, material, alert, dynamic living community here on earth.  The Quaker way of defining oneself in history is to create that Kingdom here, now; and history will be complete when   “justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream”.

I can write those words, I do not know what role I have to play.  I have not the slightest idea how to begin speaking Truth to those in power I hear every day on radio and TV  speaking  only the language of greed and consumption, and who devise and implement policies which are designed to make the rich richer, and are  literally costing the earth; and who would dismiss the last part of this blog as naïve hogwash, if they even gave it any attention.  

I am slowly unlearning the habits of a lifetime, and learning not to feel deeply angry.  I await further guidance from my Inner Teacher.  

 Tears stream from my eyes
because of the destruction of my people!  My tears flow endlessly;
they will not stop until the LORD looks down
from heaven and sees. My heart is breaking
over the fate of all the women of Jerusalem

Lamentations Ch. 3