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 1862
and 2006: Carping, Posturing and Betrayal
Undermining national resolve in the face of a fanatical
enemy…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 1/19/06
History,
the Roman historian Livy said, is the best medicine for a troubled
mind. And these indeed are troubling times. Abetted by their
shills in the mainstream media, the liberal Democrats are trying
to wring every ounce of partisan advantage from the war in
Iraq, no matter how much such carping undermines our resolve
and comforts the enemy. But as I’m reminded while re-reading
the first volume of Shelby Foote’s masterpiece The
Civil War, not much of our current crisis is really that
new; but what is new is particularly dangerous.
Take the
partisan carping first. Nothing we’ve seen in this war
comes close to the vicious criticism leveled at Abraham Lincoln’s
conduct of the war. Nor was his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson
Davis, immune from the same sort of impatient nitpicking of
every difficult decision. The management of the war, just as
today, was constantly second-guessed and criticized, and failure
hysterically parsed for causes no matter how fantastical. One
of the most frequent charges made after a lost battle was “betrayal,” hollered
not just by politicians but also by many a soldier both Union
and Confederate while skedaddling from the battlefield. George
McClellan, a Democrat opposed to emancipation and a notoriously
timid general, was constantly accused of outright treachery
by the fire-eating Republican abolitionists.
And this
complaining was attended by cruel personal attacks that make
the puerile Bush-bashing by Howard Dean and moveon.org seem
complimentary in contrast. One of the favorite insults for
Lincoln was “the original gorilla,” an allusion
to speculations at the time about the Darwinian missing link.
Lincoln’s striking ugliness was a constant source of
amusement for his political enemies and even his political
kin. The New York Times’ Paris correspondent
suggested an embargo on portraits of the president in order
to preserve European support for the Union: Lincoln looked
like “a man condemned to the gallows,” and some
French shopkeepers were selling his portrait as that of a notorious
guillotined serial killer. Keep such pictures at home, the
reporter advised, for “such a face is enough to ruin
the best of causes.”
Partisan
attacks aside, the protraction of a war that both sides thought
would be over in a month jangled nerves and intensified the
demand for reasons why expectations were dashed. Then as now,
corruption, incompetence, and bad character, along with treachery,
were the easiest explanations. But mostly, the blame was Lincoln’s
for spending a million dollars a day for so little result. “The
people,” William Cullen Bryant thundered in 1862, “ have
seen armies unused in the field perish in pestilential swamps.
They have seen their money wasted in long winter encampments,
or frittered away on fruitless expeditions along the coast.
They have seen a huge debt roll up, yet no prospect of greater
military results.” Wendell Phillips, the great abolitionist
orator, pointed the finger more directly at the White House: “The
North has poured out its blood and money like water; it has
leveled every fence of constitutional privilege, and Abraham
Lincoln sits today a more unlimited despot than the world knows
this side of China. What does he render for this unbounded
confidence? Show us something, or I tell you that within two
years the indignant reaction of the people will hurl the Cabinet
in contempt from their seats.”
Phillips’ reference
to Lincoln as an “unlimited despot” raises another
instructive comparison with the present: the contraction of
civil liberties. Despite the hysteria of the ACLU and the civil
liberties fundamentalists, nothing we’ve seen so far
comes close to the measures taken by Lincoln, which included
suspending habeas corpus, closing down opposition newspapers,
and jailing editors. Nor was Congress loath to use its power
to punish those deemed insufficiently loyal or competent, whatever
Constitutional rights were ignored. The Joint Committee on
the Conduct of the War, chaired by an ardent abolitionist,
summoned generals to its basement meeting room to answer anonymous
charges without the benefit of Constitutional guarantees. After
the disaster in October1861 at Ball’s Bluff up the Potomac
River, where the North lost nearly a thousand casualties (a
huge number in those days before the carnage of Shiloh), the
general in command, Charles Stone, was accused of outright
treachery and then locked away without a trial. Secretary of
War Edwin Stanton once told a man demanding release of a friend
similarly locked away for treason, “If I tap that little
bell, I can send you to a place where you will never hear the
dogs bark.” The Republic, of course, survived these temporary
assaults on civil liberties, which rather than continuing to
contract have expanded over the years to include activities
that would have horrified the Founders.
History comforts
us with these reminders that the behaviors that so annoy both
the supporters and the critics of the current conflict are
typical of a society at war, especially a democracy in which
the military is subjected to control and audit by civilian
power. Thus it has always been, ever since the Athenian people
executed eight victorious admirals for failing to collect the
dead after the sea-battle at Arginusae in 406 BC. So what we
are going through now is what we should expect, particularly
in a mid-term election year (as was 1862), when the party out
of power is eager for victory, and the party in power is eager
for reelection. But history also reveals something novel about
our own predicament––the unrealistic expectations
of a therapeutic culture that refuses to accept the tragic
limitations of human action and that prizes psychic and material
comfort over everything else.
Such attitudes
are nowhere to be found in 1862. Whereas contemporary critics
obsess over casualties, declare failure halfway through the
war, and demand that we give up before the issue is decided,
the critics back then for the most part were angry not about
soldiers dying but about a lack of aggressiveness. Their carping
and nitpicking, as the statements of Bryant and Phillips indicate,
were driven by the demand that their side do whatever it took
to win and win quickly––not, as with most of our
contemporary critics, by a dissatisfaction with the usual brutal
costs of war. McClellan’s caution earned him the love
of his troops, but led to his downfall because his lack of
offensive aggression, while it kept his men alive, cost several
chances for victory, particularly when his army was entrenched
before Richmond, faced by a rebel army it outnumbered by more
than a fourth. The 2000 dead in today’s war that convinces
critics the whole enterprise is a misguided, costly failure
are a bit more than the toll of Union dead at one battle: Shiloh,
the first of numerous horrendous, large-scale battles that
would ultimately cost 600,000 dead and millions more disabled.
Our ancestors understood that, as Confederate cavalry commander
Nathan Bedford Forrest put it, “War means fighting. And
fighting means killing.” If we have an army, then at
some point it will have to fight, and that means people are
going to die.
Many today,
however, don’t believe that war is ever justified; their
criticisms thus reflect a stealth pacifism that history shows
is a luxury purchased by those who will kill for the benefit
of those who won’t. Others think that violence can be
used to achieve our aims without any mistakes, any setbacks,
any bad decisions, or anybody suffering, including our enemies.
The messy, unpredictable reality of human nature and action
is ignored in favor of a utopian delusion that force can be
used with the precision and predictability of a surgeon removing
a tumor. More important, these therapeutic utopians demand
that suffering be kept to a minimum approaching zero, that
no images appear on their televisions and in their newspapers
that will make them feel bad. These expectations, of course,
set a standard for using force that can never be met, as we
see in the current war, where casualties of both troops and
civilians have been remarkably low in historical terms, yet
nonetheless critics howl over every death as evidence of incompetence
or callous indifference.
Lincoln certainly
did not have such illusions about war. When people in Union-occupied
New Orleans complained about the harsh policies of general
Benjamin Butler––he hanged a man who had torn down
the Union flag, and he seized the assets and cotton even of
pro-Union planters––Lincoln showed no sympathy. “The
true remedy,” he wrote, “does not lie in rounding
the rough angles of the war, but in removing the necessity
of war.” That some suffer, perhaps even unjustly, during
the conduct of a war is no argument for not fighting: “Would
you drop the war where it is?” he asked rhetorically. “Or
would you prosecute it in future with elder-stalk squirts charged
with rose-water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier
ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available
means unapplied?” He concluded in terms that would horrify
our modern tender sensibilities: “ I shall do no more
than I can, and I shall do all I can.”
Lincoln was
as good as his word, finally getting rid of McClellan and eventually
putting in charge U. S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant,
who like the President understood the tragic nature of war,
what Lincoln called the “awful arithmetic”: killing
some today so that more don’t die tomorrow. We, on the
other hand, demand that the “rough angles of war” be
smoothed away, believe that “lighter blows” are
preferable to decisive heavy ones, pretend that we really don’t
have to kill some today because we’re ready to gamble
that more won’t die tomorrow, and are eager to abandon
the struggle because the tragic, eternal realities of conflict
disturb our psychic well-being.
This is the
difference between 1862 and 2006 that offers little comfort,
for we are facing a jihadist enemy fanatical in his devotion
to his cause and counting precisely on our failure of nerve
to compensate for his military weakness. He knows very well
that our therapeutic sensibilities hinder us from doing all
we can to win, and from reckoning with the “awful arithmetic” the
cost of achieving our aims. Fortunately, our military is made
up of a very different breed, and their skill and devotion
still give us a good chance for victory. Time will tell whether
or not they are enough. -one-
copyright
2006 Bruce S. Thornton
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by Bruce S. Thornton |
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