A column about history, culture, policy, and things in between.
Edmund Ruffin, an artilleryman under the command of General Pierre Beauregard, pulled the lanyard on a 12-pound Parrott fieldpiece, and watched as the solid shot arched across the Charleston harbor towards Fort Sumter. The Fort he fired upon was home to the United States Army, and Ruffin’s act ushered in the bloodiest war in America’s history. So bloody that the casualties of all other wars combined still do not equal those of this conflict.
It was April 12th 1861, and the Civil War had begun.
The flashpoint issue and great moral imperative that ignited the war was, of course, slavery. But what brought Lincoln and Congress to authorize the invasion of the South was the question of secession. The Union declared war on the Confederacy with the primary and stated objective of preserving the Union. Over ninety percent of the men who would serve in the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia never owned a slave. They fought for what they perceived as their political rights and the protection of their homeland.
Militarily the war was a case of brains against brawn. Despite inferiority in men, horses, transport, supplies, weaponry, and any other material advantage one can have in war, the abilities of Robert Edward Lee and Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson would befuddle and astound their northern counterparts. Lee’s strategic brilliance and audacious spirit, combined with Jackson’s ability to strike with unparalleled speed and fury, would keep the outcome very much in doubt for over two years.
The two dominant figures of the War were a soldier and a politician - Lee and Lincoln.
Like all of history’s immortal commanders, Lee was a man of great magnetism and towering intellect. Raised in the rich Virginian tradition of Presidents and horsemen, he was handsome, athletic, possessed of tremendous reservoirs of stamina and courage, and valedictorian of his class at West Point. He was widely recognized as the most capable commander in the Union Army, and as such was offered its command at the time of the war. But he could not raise his sword against his beloved Virginia. He declined the offer; taking instead a Generalship under the Confederacy, a decision he was convinced would banish him to historical oblivion. He is buried in the Chapel at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where he served as its President in the post-war South. During his tenure there it was known only as Washington University, named after our first President. In fitting tribute to the man who was Washington’s equal, Lee’s name was added to the University’s upon his death. I came very close to attending that school, and toured the beautiful campus in the verdant Virginia April of 1976. I can well remember sitting quietly with my parents in the chapel as the morning light poured through the arched windows. I remember gazing at his sun-drenched tomb, absorbing the still quiet, and thinking about the manner of man he was.
Lincoln was the other side of the coin. Tall, gangly, homely; he possessed none of Lee’s easy, natural gifts. He was the product of the Illinois frontier and a grim, almost iron determination. Self-educated, he entered politics with about the same chance as a knife wielder in a gunfight. But the mark of destiny was upon him, and in the election of 1860 he became our 16th President. With the possible exception of Harry Truman, no other President has even approximated the crucible of awful decisions that faced Lincoln. One imagines him pacing the halls of the White House on those countless nights when sleep was a stranger. One tries to imagine the overwhelming, flattening pressure - the sheer weight of what he carried. One tries to imagine his anguish over the slaughter, and the hauntingly persistent question, “have I done the right thing”? One cannot.
But as you read the transcendent beauty of his prose in philippics such as the Gettysburg Address, and as you contemplate the magnitude of his vision and his will, one can only give silent homage to and gratitude for such a man. Surely the hand of Providence was upon him. Surely his contemporaries could say of him that he was put here “for such a time as this”.
Today the Civil War, like most of our history, is trivialized, discounted, and worst, slowly allowed to recede in our historical rear view mirrors.
Lincoln and Lee still have much to tell us if we would but listen.
