[Vision2020] Carnage

[Ron Force]

Yes, Abraham Lincoln addressed this in the Second Inaugural:

  One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not  distributed 
generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part  of it. These 
slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All  knew that this 
interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen,  perpetuate, and 
extend this interest was the object for which the  insurgents would rend the 
Union even by war, while the Government  claimed no right to do more than to 
restrict the territorial enlargement  of it. Neither party expected for the war 
the magnitude or the duration  which it has already attained. Neither 
anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the 
conflict itself  should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result 
less  fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the  same 
God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem  strange that any 
men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in  wringing their bread from the 
sweat of other men's faces, but let us  judge not, that we be not judged. The 
prayers of both could not be  answered. That of neither has been answered fully. 
The Almighty has His  own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for 
it must needs  be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense 
cometh."  If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses  
which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having  continued 
through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that  He gives to both 
North and South this terrible war as the woe due to  those by whom the offense 
came, shall we discern therein any departure  from those divine attributes which 
the believers in a living God always  ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, 
fervently do we pray, that this  mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. 
Yet, if God wills that it  continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 
two hundred and  fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every 
drop of  blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the 
sword,  as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the  
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

 Ron Force
Moscow Idaho USA




________________________________
From: Art Deco <deco at moscow.com>
To: Vision 2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Mon, April 4, 2011 7:41:38 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Carnage

 
Book Review
Politics, religion, and the Civil War
By Michael  Kenney 
April 4, 2011 
 
After one of his lightning-strike victories in the  western Virginia valleys, 
Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall’’ Jackson  exulted to his officers, “He 
who does not see the hand of God in this is blind,  sir, blind!’’
And in the early summer of 1862, as Jackson prepared to  head east toward 
Richmond, it was at the head of what he called “[his] army of  the living God.’’
Jackson was arguably an extreme case, but in historian David Goldfield’s  
“America Aflame’’ he stands as a mighty symbol of the competing religious fervor  
that stoked the conflict and moved North and South inexorably into  war.
“The political system,’’ writes Goldfield, a history professor at the  
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, “could not contain the passions  
stoked by the infusion of evangelical Christianity into the political process.’’  
The various political disputes of the time, “and above all slavery,’’ he writes,  
“assumed moral dimensions that confounded political solutions.’’ And as “the  
bonds of Union fell away,’’ violence and eventually war “became an acceptable  
alternative because it worked’’ as perhaps the only way to resolve  
irreconcilable differences.
The notion of moral conflict implicit in the Civil War is not a novel concept  
and has been a theme in the accounts of many historians, most recently another  
Southern historian, George C. Rable in “God’s Almost Chosen Peoples.’’  
Goldfield’s book differs, however, in embracing it as its central  element.
“While New England pulpits resonated with the righteousness of anti-slavery  
ministers,’’ Goldfield writes, “Southern divines mobilized their influence for  
what they believed to be a holy cause.’’
The first great clash came at Bull Run “on an idyllic early Sabbath morning’’  
in July 1861, and their victory “confirmed for many Southerners the idea that  
the Confederacy was God’s Chosen Nation’’ — the “crowning token’’ of God’s love,  
as a Georgia preacher put it. As a practical matter, however, the battle exacted  
significant losses on both sides and in the end “was a limited affair, with no  
strategic advantage gained or lost.’’
Amid the carnage, Goldfield offers images of the natural beauty that became  
fields of blood. Antietam, in September 1862, was “like ‘a poem in blue and  
gold,’ covered with patches of woods, sunlit fields, ripe orchards, and  
mountains gently rolling on the near horizon.’’
As the war continued with deadly battles that were never quite conclusive,  the 
early elation turned to bitterness as casualty counts mounted. And by 1864,  
Goldfield writes, “the persistent flow of blood was giving soldiers and  
civilians alike second thoughts about God’s role, if any, in the conflict.’’ The  
evangelical religion that had fueled the dispute “did not prepare either side  
for the carnage.’’
The North moved on, creating the nation of Goldfield’s subtitle. “Exhibit A’’  
would be the Centennial Exposition of 1876 presided over by President Grant, the  
North’s victorious general.
But as “Northerners moved away from a civil society informed and directed by  
evangelical Protestantism,’’ Goldfield writes, “Southerners embraced it, and  
embraced it so fiercely that it became a folk religion indistinguishable from  
Southern culture.’’ To have a sense of how powerful a force evangelical  
Protestantism would become in the South it’s instructive to note that the final  
words uttered by the Confederate leader Jackson after being mortally wounded in  
the Battle of Chancellorsville were “let us pass over the river and rest under  
the shade of the trees,’’ the title of a new Methodist hymn.
Michael Kenney, a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge, can be reached  at 
mkenney777 at gmail.com. AMERICA AFLAME: How the Civil War Created a Nation By 
David  Goldfield
Bloomsbury, 632 pp., illustrated, $35  
 
 
 
 ________________________________________________
Wayne A. Fox
1009  Karen Lane
PO Box 9421
Moscow, ID  83843
 
waf at moscow.com
208  882-7975



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20110404/088c7f46/attachment.html