Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 10:51am

Lessons to Learn

As we observe the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, it is all too easy in studying battles, strategies, emancipation, political conflicts, etc., to lose sight of the fact that those going through this immense struggle were individuals like us.  The video above, with photos of Confederate soldiers, helps remind us of what just an immense tragedy the Civil War was for the loved ones of every soldier who fell in that war.  Virtually every soldier was loved by some one, and usually many people:  parents, siblings, friends, other relatives, and a wife or girlfriend.  It is fitting and proper that we study the war, but we must never lose sight of the human suffering behind what we study.  Many of the men in the photos in the video above doubtless died of illness or battlefield wounds far from family and loved ones.  It is for us to draw meaning from why they fought and what they died for.

It is poor business measuring the mouldered ramparts and counting the silent guns, marking the deserted battlefields and decorating the grassy graves, unless we can learn from it some nobler lesson than to destroy.  Men write of this, as of other wars, as if the only thing necessary to be impressed upon the rising generation were the virtue of physical courage and contempt of death.  It seems to me that is the last thing we need to teach;  for since the days of John Smith in Virginia and the men of the Mayflower in Massachusetts, no generation of Americans has shown any lack of it.  From Louisburg to Petersburg-a hundred and twenty years, the full span of four generations-they have stood to their guns and been shot down in greater comparative numbers than any other race on earth.  In the war of secession there was not a State, not a county, probably not a town, between the great lakes and the gulf, that was not represented on fields where all that men could do with powder and steel was done and valor exhibited at its highest pitch…There is not the slightest necessity for lauding American bravery or impressing it upon American youth.  But there is the gravest necessity for teaching them respect for law, and reverence for human life, and regard for the rights of their fellow country-men, and all that is significant in the history of our country…These are simple lessons, yet they are not taught in a day, and some who we call educated go through life without mastering them at all.

Rossiter Johnson, Campfire and Battlefield, 1884

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Joe Green
Joe Green
Sunday, October 30, AD 2011 8:26am

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers

John Nolan
John Nolan
Sunday, October 30, AD 2011 11:31am

Fifty years ago when I was ten years old, Irish-American relatives in Pennsylvania sent me a pack of facsimile documents relating to American history. Among these was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I had of course heard of the battle and the American Civil War – thanks to Hollywood, English boys of my age knew more about this war than our own more remote fratricidal conflict. I was so impressed with the language and the sentiments expressed that I learned it off by heart.

If the PrayTell blog is anything to go by, a large number of Catholics in the USA (and it seems in Ireland as well) are up in arms about the new translation of the Roman Missal, even going so far as to claim the language is not English, or if it is, it is not comprehensible to the man in the street. I know that most of the critics have other axes to grind, but I wonder what they think of Lincoln’s celebrated rhetoric? ” … we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground.” This sort of rhetorical flourish occurs in the Latin of the Roman Canon, and is now rendered into English; “… these gifts, these offerings, these holy and unblemished sacrifices …” and “… this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless victim …” to give two examples. What is it about this that makes liberals foam at the mouth? And what would Lincoln’s address sound like if it were written by Obama or his speechwriters?

Joe Green
Joe Green
Sunday, October 30, AD 2011 1:54pm

Don, had the Founders true foresight they would have picked their own cotton and never imported any slaves. Both races would have been better off.

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