"Americans of the Civil War generation lived through an experience in which time and consciousness took on new dimensions."-James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) Preface (xiii).
"The war...has assumed such huge proportions that...no preoccupation can exclude it, & no hermitage hide us."-Ralph Waldo Emerson, New Hampshire, three days later in 1861.
"I have lived as much in the last ten days as in the last thirty years."-General George Meade after Gettysburg, 1863.
"I wonder whether any of us will ever be able to live contented in times of peace and laziness."-Henry Adams, United States Embassy, London, 1865.
"The conflict crowded into a few years the emotions of a lifetime."-a northern civilian in 1865.
Millions in 2020 could write the same.
After Four Years of Failure: Ch. 25
We Are All Americans: Ch. 28
The first Civil War didn’t turn out too good for the good guys. We fought it for another 100 years. 2016 was a strange nationalist, authoritarian, anti-democratic mutation of the southern political ideology. I don’t have the conciliatory impulses that the two sides in the Civil War showed in the Gettysburg reunions or that the two sides displayed in Lansing, MI yesterday but impulse control is what adults do. I am an adult, ergo.
Our new president, like Abraham Lincoln, says “We are not enemies, we are all Americans.” I have thought about the first Civil War sooo much in the last four years. How many times are we going to do the Reconstruction thing? Will it ever be time to tattoo a “T” to the foreheads of the Disgustings and en masse march them on foot out of our presence to relocation centers in the great open spaces of the mountain west?
World War II was a continuation of World War I after an armistice. Although Lee unconditionally surrendered at Appomatox the 155 years after have revealed it to be more an armistice. Robert Morganthau had enough of Germany after World War II and presented the victorious Allies with a considered, not impulsive, plan to empty Prussia and turn it into a pastoral. I have our own post-Civil War experience and that of the world with Germany in mind at this time.
I also remember David Plouffe tweeting before the Catastrophe that it is not enough that Trumpism be beaten, it must be crushed so that it never rises again. In the event, it was not even beaten in 2016 and though beaten now in 2020 it has clearly not been crushed. At this writing 70.8M people voted for the American Hitler. What is to be done with them?