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  • From: "Beck, David A" <dabeck AT iupui.edu>
  • To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
  • Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2014 08:50:35 -0400

Janet,
I'm not sure we are a "shining light to the world" anymore or have been
for a long time. Our credibility has been on a downhill slide since
Viet Nam. I'm more apt to remember Percy's analogy of the old, rusting,
roller coaster at the beginning of Love in the Ruins: "now [is]the
blessing [on the U.S.A.] or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the
chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?" (I love that passage.)

-David



Quoting janetcantor37--- via Percy-L <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>:

How lovely to read this now. But how sad because I am beginning to
think that this is becoming obsolete thinking these days. There is
more race rancor in our conversation today than I can remember since
the 60's. It shouldn't be this way. I wish it were not so. We have a
great country. I hope we don't lose it because we are asleep at the
switch. It is a country worth saving, a shining light to the world. I
wonder what Percy would be saying about current attitudes?
Janet Cantor


________________________________
From: Jim Forest <jhforest AT gmail.com>
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
<percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2014 6:04 AM
Subject: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War



from the March 29, 1957 issue of Commonweal
 
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/american-war
 
The American War
 
by Walker Percy
 
WHAT ARE THE reasons for the current revival of interest in
the Civil War? That there is such a revival is undeniable. Books on the War
pour off the presses every week?some of them, incidentally, of a very high
order, such as Bruce Catton's This Hallowed Ground and Shelby Foote's Shiloh!
What is at once noticeable about the current literature is its frankly
non-political character and the absence of the old rancor. The race issue may
be still very much an issue, but Northern and Southern historians
have achieved
a common view of the War itself. When Catton from Michigan and Foote from
Mississippi write about the battle of Shiloh, it sounds like the same battle.
Catton is never more eloquent than when he is appraising Lee's generalship;
Foote is just as impressed by the fighting qualities of the Northern soldier.
Indeed, from this distance the underdog psychology probably kindles
the reader's
enthusiasm more readily than do the social issues?and perhaps this is just as
well.
 
The general impression outside the South seems to be that it
is the rest of the country which has rediscovered the Civil War, that
the South
has never stopped looking back. This is mistaken, I believe, and is due to an
understandable optical illusion. The truth is, at least in my
experience, that
the Southerner never thinks about the Civil War?until he finds himself among
Northerners. Then, for some reason-perhaps because the Northerner insists on
casting him in his historical role and the Southerner is perfectly willing to
oblige, or because, lost in the great cities of the North, he feels for the
first time the need of his heritage?he breaks out the Stars and Bars. I
remember traveling from Alabama to summer camp in Wisconsin in the twenties.
The train would stop in Chicago to pick up more boys. We from Alabama
had heard
as little about the Civil War as the Boer War and cared less, but every time
the Illinois boys got on in Chicago the War started, a real brawl yet not
really bad-tempered. The same sort of thing must have happened during
the World
War I when an Alabama division suddenly found itself in a donnybrook with the
Fighting 69th at Plattsburg.
 
The truth of it is, I think, that the whole country, South
included, is just beginning to see the Civil War whole and entire for
the first
time. The thing was too big and too bloody, too full of suffering and hatred,
too closely knit into the fabric of our meaning as a people, to be
held off and
looked at-until now. It is like a man walking away from a mountain.
The bigger
it is, the farther he's got to go before he can see it. Then one day he looks
back and there it is, this colossal thing lying across his past.
 
A history of the shifting attitudes toward the War would be
enlightening. There would probably emerge a pattern common to such great
events, a dialectic of loss-recovery: the long period of recollection, of in­
tense partisan interest which is followed by a gradual fading of the
Event into
a dusty tapestry. (Lee and Grant at Appomattox taking their place beside
Washington Crossing the Delaware.) Then under certain circumstances, there is
the recovery. Perhaps Washington will never be recovered, having been
ossified
too long in grammar school tableaus. But Lincoln and Grant and McClellan and
even the legendary Lee, who after all are closer in time to
Washington than to
us, have come very much alive. Why, then, their recovery, and what
exactly has
been recovered?
 
WHAT HAS been recovered, it seems clear, is not the politics
or the sociology of the War, nor even the slavery issue, but the
fight itself.
The tableau I remember from school was the Reconciliation, Grant and
Lee in the
McLean house, Lee healing the wounds at Washington College. Little was said
about the War, except that it was tragic; brother fighting against brother,
etc. Undoubtedly this was the necessary if somewhat boring emphasis for the
textbooks. Now, after ninety years of Reconciliation, we can take a
look at the
fight itself.
 
What a fight it was! The South is a very big place, yet
there is hardly a district that didn't have its skirmish, its Federal gunboat
sunk in a bayou?where some old-timer won't tell you, "Yes, they came
through here." It is startling to realize that there were more casualties
in the Civil War than in all the American forces of World War II, and
more than
in all other American wars put together. Of 3,000,000 men under arms,
2,300,000
for the Union, 750,000 for the Con­ federacy, 618,222 died, with total
casualties probably going well past a million. For sheer concentrated fury,
there are few events even in modern warfare to equal that terrible
September 17
at Antietam Creek when over 20,000 men fell?or the May-June of '64
when, beginning
with the battle of the Wilderness, Grant lost on the average of 2,000
men a day
for 30 days, culminating in the slaughter at Cold Harbor when over 8,000 men
fell in about ten minutes! There were murderous battles in the West which one
never heard of, like Stone's River with over 25,000 casualties.
 
Yet terrible as it was, it is impossible to read of the Army
of Northern Virginia or of the Army of the Potomac without being caught up in
the tremendous drama. The armies were big enough so that the action
took place
on an epic scale, yet the War was, as much as were the Punic Wars, a personal
encounter of the opposing leaders. Lee was very much aware of this
grim beauty
when the fog rose over Fredericksburg showing Burnside's entire army facing
his, battle flags flying.  "It is
well that war is so terrible,? he said; "else we should grow too fond of
it." But what gave the Civil War the tragic proportions of the Iliad 
was the  fact, apparent after Shiloh, that the American soldier,
Union and
Confederate, was not going to be beaten until he could literally fight no
longer or was killed. When his leader was great, he was almost
invincible; when
his leader was mediocre, he was still superb. Pickett's charge is justly
famous, but just as heartbreaking was the Union  assault on
Longstreet's position in the sunken road at Fredericksburg.
The difference was that where Pickett?s men had every confidence in Lee,
Couch's men knew very well that Burnside was wrong. Yet they attacked all day
long, and only stopped when the field was piled so high with dead that they
could no longer run over them.
 
AS IN ALL tragedies, a great deal seemed to de­ pend upon
fate. Small mischances become as important as Thetis?s oversight when she
dipped Achilles?all but his heel?into the Styx.  A Con­federate
courier  loses some
battle orders;  they  are found wrapped  around  three cigars and
brought to McClellan; the direct result is the battle
of Antietam. One can't read of that war without playing the
fascinating game of
what-if.... What if Jackson had lived through Chancellorsville? What if
McClellan had listened to Phil Kearny (instead of the Pinkerton detectives)
during the Seven Days? What if Jeb Stuart had tended to business at
Gettysburg?
Lee was always just missing his Cannae and Lincoln's generals were
always just
short of ordinary competence?until he got Grant.
 
Besides the great failures, there were the great successes,
the heroes' deeds which are always irresistible to the human spirit
and so pass
over immediately into the legend of the race. There was Chancellorsville when
Lee, facing Hooker's 85,000, divided his battered army of 43,000,
sent Jackson
to the left, leaving him in front of Hooker with 17,000 men?and attacked and
very nearly destroyed the Army of the Potomac. There was the Union's
"Pap" Thomas's assault on Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga and the
subsequent demoralization of Bragg. And there was the fateful decision at
Spotsylvania when, after taking a fearful mauling, Grant, instead of falling
back toward Washington as the army had been doing for the past three years,
re­treated south, sliding around Lee's right.
 
Therein lies the tragedy. If Lee had been a little more or a
little less?if he had gotten his Cannae or if he had only been just competent
and been whipped by McClellan in '62?the results would still have
been notable,
but they would not have approached the terror and  piteousness of
what actually did happen. The
summer of 1864 has a Gotterdammerung quality. With the issue hardly in doubt
after Gettysburg, the fighting nevertheless increased in fury with both sides
attacking steadily, without the usual remissions between battles.
 
YET WITH all the horror, or perhaps because of it, there was
always the feeling then, and even now as we read about it, that the things a
man lived through were somehow twice as real, twice as memorable as the peace
that followed. Peace is better than war, yet it is a sad fact that
some of the
heroes of the War, like Grant and Longstreet and many a lesser man, found the
peace a long descent into mediocrity.  In
the ordeal the man himself seemed to become more truly himself, revealing his
character or the lack of it, than at any time before or after. If a man was
secretly cowardly or secretly brave, stupid or shrewd, that was what he was
shown to be. The War infallibly discovered his hidden weakness and his hidden
strength. Hooker the braggart was reduced to impotence simply by having Lee's
small army in front of him (and understandably, for the veterans of
the Army of
the Potomac used to say to replacements fresh from victories in the West:
"Wait till you meet Bobby Lee"). Grant the ne'er-do-well matured in
defeat and became a noble and sensitive human being by having Lee at
his mercy.
It is no wonder that there was the temptation, especially in the
ruined South,
to enshrine those four years as the four years of truth and to discount all
other times, even the future.
 
Then there were the thousand and one lesser en­counters, any
one of which, if it had happened at another time, would have its own
literature
and its own historians: the Confederate raiders, Farragut's capture of New
Orleans, the battle of the ironclads, Forrest's miniature Cannae at Bryce
Crossroads, James Andrews' stealing  the
Confederate train, and so on. It was the last of the wars of
individuals, when
a single man's ingenuity and pluck not only counted for some­ thing in itself
but could conceivably a:ffect the entire issue. Forrest himself is quite
unbelievable. It is as if Launcelot had been reborn in Memphis. He
carried into
battle a cavalry saber sharpened to a razor edge and actually killed men with
it. He actually did fool a Yankee commander into surrendering by parading a
single cannon back and forth in the distance as they parleyed. He
actually did
have twenty-nine horses shot from under him.
 
THERE IS an ambiguity about this new interest in the Civil
War. On the one hand it is the past recaptured, the authentic recovery of the
long agony during which this nation came to be what it is. Yet there is also
the temptation to yield to an historical illusion by which the past seems to
gain in stature and authenticity as it recedes and the present to be
discounted
because it is the here and now. We sense the illusion in the words of the
old-timer, "Yes, they came through here," in which it is somehow
implied that this place has existed in a long trivial aftermath after its one
day of glory. Perhaps the North is in for a mild case of the same romanticism
which the South recovered from over fifty years ago.
 
The increased emphasis upon the fighting at the expense of
ideology is probably good. One does well, anyway, not to apply ideology too
closely to that war. James Truslow Adams can talk about the March of
Democracy
and Bruce Catton can call the Union army a truly revolutionary army
and perhaps
they are right. Perhaps the War was really and truly fought over
slavery. But the
other case can be made too. It is difficult to see the yeoman farmers who
largely made up the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of Northern
Virginia as
Southern Bourbons. The South had some reason to regard the fight as a
continuation of the American Revolution. After all it was her soil which was
being invaded and her independence which was being denied. The South
might even
have the better of the constitutional argument; yet what won out seems to
transcend all the arguments. For it is that extraordinary thing, the American
Union.
 
* * *
Jim & Nancy Forest

Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands 

Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/

Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com

Photo albums: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/
Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/
On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/
A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/
In Communion site: www.incommunion.org
Forest-Flier Editorial Services: http://forestflier.com/

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