Victory in Virginia Day: A Stillness at Appomattox

April 9th is a day which we should celebrate as fervently as the Fourth of July.
Fireworks, marches, balloons, flags, lots of flags.
It was the day Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.
The fighting did not entirely cease, but the remaining Confederate armies in the field were rendered ineffective and surrendered ineluctably.
A guerilla war in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, some of it led by Confederate generals like Bedford Forrest tried to undo the outcome, tried to win the war by other means.
Grant exerted every effort to thwart this hideous Klan.

American Swastika

The Civil War was, as James McPherson has described it, the Second American Revolution, the movement with finally freed all men (except, of course for "Native Americans") and Lincoln made sure the fighting was not undone by legal shenanigans and he got the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments passed as a condition of the Southern states being readmitted to the Union.
These amendments did not give the vote to women, but it was a beginning, a step toward universal enfranchisement and full citizenship.

Gentleman slaver.

Of course, the war began as a war to save the Union, but to save a union from what? From Southerners intent on protecting "States' Rights?" And what were these rights which were so cherished?The right to own and sell and rape slaves.

Relentless.

None of us today is as close to that epoch as Abraham Lincoln, and you have to allow him a certain amount of authority here. Looking back at the four years of war at his Second Inaugural a month before Appomattox, Lincoln gave a succinct and utterly persuasive history of the war.  He said that at the outset, nobody wanted to admit it was about slavery, but as the years wore on and as freed slaves made their presence felt, it became clear, the war had been about slavery all along. Union troops, marching through the South were often appalled and repulsed by the freed slaves who followed them, but, eventually, the presence of these slaves sunk in and the ordinary soldier could believe, in some part of his mind, his efforts were in fact heroic. War has a way of crushing any thoughts of heroism in the minds of those who fight it, and men fight for their fellow soldiers, but that experience of seeing overjoyed freed slaves had to affect even the most cynical.

Nobody even comes close.

In one of the greatest speeches ever uttered by anyone on this planet, and certainly by any American President, Lincoln said, as only he could say, what had happened.

"An impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

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."

"I will make Georgia howl."

What really good writing is, after all, is an explication, in understandable terms, of the truth.

No American has ever been better at this than Lincoln.

Lee, who many, even today, in the South, regard as a fine gentleman who was too kindly to be a slaver, fought tooth and nail to protect slavery. He was not kind to his own slaves and his armies murdered white Union officers who led Negro regiments and slaughtered the soldiers after they had surrendered or captured them and returned them to slavery. He is buried with his horse in Lexington Virginia. He would have felt violated had slaves been buried nearby, but his horse, oh, that was most excellent. Think about that.

The United States of America is exceptional among nations in only one important way, as far as Mad Dog is concerned:  In the long and bloody history of this planet only one nation across the millennia has ever fought its most costly war, or any war for that matter, to free an underclass within its own body politic.

Protesting the removal of Lee's statue

Walk through our cemeteries here in Hampton, or Hampton Falls or anywhere in the Granite State, as far north as Gilmanton and Holderness and you see them there, men in their twenties, dead in 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865.  In the Holderness cemetery, the majority of graves from these years are fighting age men. There is a plaque there, and all over New Hampshire there are similar plaques, with the names of the dead soldiers who went South to fight. Nason Road in Hampton Falls is named after a man who raised a Union regiment.

What Lee fought for

Nobody should imagine all these men left town to free slaves. Each man likely had his own reasons. But we cannot be as cynical as Boris Pasternak, who said, no happy man leaves home to go to war. Men whose lives could have been long and often pleasurable went to fight.

Sheridan and his staff (Custer on right)

And  you know the men who joined the Massachusetts 54 th, the Negro regiment about whom the book and movie "Glory" was made went to fight for emancipation.

Falstaff looked at a rotting body on the battlefield and said, "There's glory for you."

Again, cynicism which is often and mostly true, but not entirely.

Grief and History. But not regret.

If this country ever had heroes, it was then:  Joshua Chamberlain who held the Union flank at Gettysburg, Phil Sheridan (whose wife famously said, "I would rather be Phil Sheridan's widow than any living man's wife") Sherman, and, of course, Grant.  And let us not forget the greatest hero of all: Abraham Lincoln.

If we are anything special, if the nations survives Trump, if it survives another 300 years, we will still be looking back to these citizens and wonder how God made such men.

Americans today, none of us were alive then. Because they were great, does not make us great. But their lives can inspire us and teach us. When we think of giving up, of not taking a stand when an aristocracy, a billionaire class tries to secure its own wealth and advantages by stomping on an underclass, we can ask ourselves: What would Lincoln do?