Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:08pm

With Malice Toward None

 

 

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

 

Lincoln never regarded the seceding states as having been out of the Union and wanted them restored to their proper place in the Union, cleansed of slavery, as quickly as possible.  After his assassination General Grant threatened to resign if any attempt was made to try General Lee for treason.  Lee of course had firmly rejected the proposal that the South should resort to guerrilla war to prolong the conflict.   Lee was also so grateful for the lenient terms that Grant gave to the Army of Northern Virginia that he refused to have General Grant disparaged in his presence. Lee counseled Confederates to forget the War, to be patriots of their restored nation and to give up hatreds spawned by the war.  Grant noted the efforts on both sides for reconciliation just before his death:

 

“I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophecy; but I feel it within me that it is to be so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to “Let us have peace.”   A striking indication that Grant’s words were coming true occurred shortly after he wrote them.  At his funeral his pallbearers were Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan and Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Simon Bolivar Buckner.  Union and Confederate officers rode together in carriages in Grant’s funeral procession.  The day was August 8, 1885.  What Grant and Lee planted 20 years ago was beginning to bear fruit.

Those involved in this healing process were wise men and great men and our nation is ever in their debt.  We live in a time of foolish men and petty men and our nation may well curse their names for generations to come.

 

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Tuesday, September 6, AD 2022 5:43am

FYI. It took the first Repubkican President to ebnd slavery.

All the slavers and traitors [both north and south] were democrats.

One hundred sixty years later the democrats are abusing millions of black Americans.

In fact, during the Spanish American War in Cuba TR [Alone in Cuba] served under a former confederate cavalry general, Wheeler.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Tuesday, September 6, AD 2022 8:28am

Wajahat Ali is an uncommonly foolish man in a world that is raising bumper crops of fools. As must be the case with a beclowned fellow like himself, he is unfamiliar with Lincoln’s first inaugural address, and the closing plea.

Donald Link
Tuesday, September 6, AD 2022 9:30am

Interesting the contrast with the aftermath of WW I when revenge was the operative tactic of the day. No one was satisfied and so the foundation for continuing the war in another form a decade later was laid. Japan invaded China, Italy against Libya etc. until full on combat was resumed on 1 Sep 39. There are lessons there but few seem to have learned them.

Tom Byrne
Tom Byrne
Tuesday, September 6, AD 2022 11:14am

Donald:
Apples and oranges. WWI ended with the wrong Germans punished and the ones who started the war escaped with their lands, factories and militarist ideology intact. While it would have been politically impossible, Germany should have been occupied and treated like we had to treat it after WWII. Then all that that involved would have avoided, including the Holocaust and the USSR halfway to the Rhine for forty years.
Italy already had Libya in 1913 and would not have embarked on further aggression without German support. Japan’s imperialism was its own issue, and had nothing to do with WWI. A crushed and occupied Germany might have made them hesitate.

Clinton
Clinton
Tuesday, September 6, AD 2022 11:40am

When I think of the convulsions our country recently went through with the BLM/antifa riots; I wonder how different those months might have been if Obama had been a better man.

While he wasn’t President at the time, of course, our first black President was in a unique position to call for an end to the violence and destruction. His voice, had he chosen to use it, could have done a lot to keep protests peaceful. The left would never heed Trump, but they would have listened to Obama if he’d come out against the American-on-American violence of that time.

It’s a pity he chose to be such a small man at a time like that.

trackback
Tuesday, September 6, AD 2022 11:23pm

[…] from The American Catholic: After the American Civil War vs. Today’s Acrimony – Donald R. McClarey, J.D. Posthumous Justice for Spanish Civil War Victims – Donald R. […]

Bob
Bob
Wednesday, September 7, AD 2022 7:35am

Your timing is odd. You should not compare the post-civil war conditions with now; but rather the acrimony of the 1850s secfional debates leading up to war with now. The similarities, unfortunately, are rather marked.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, September 7, AD 2022 9:07am

All the violence and hatred is coming from the left.

Ali’s garbage is straight out of the left’s garbage play book.

Their policies are so horrid that today, one in six American families must choose between eating and paying the electric bill.

So, they need to create execrable, fictitious straw men to distract and incite the filthy low-IQ, low-information media and mob.

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