the destroyer > the vent > Jonathon Walter

AMERICANS KILLING EACH OTHER

More Americans decided to kill each other during the Civil War than during any time period in our history, and so in order to understand our own depressed times it’s necessary we attempt to understand it, much as the therapist, in attempting to diagnose the cause of a current depressive episode, must focus on the childhood rape rather than the pleasant weeks at summer camp, the schoolyard bullying rather than the fulfilling job, the painful divorce rather than the nubile rebound.

I am a Northerner and thus it is probably impossible for me to judge anything relating to the war objectively. Southerners have the same problem. I don’t know who that leaves. Canadians?

It is often said (and this in fact seems to be the center of a kind of academic truce) that while the cause the Southerners fought for may have been immoral, one can and should admire the tenacity with which they fought for it. This is of course the natural and healthy admiration that most of us have for the underdog. But here we come to the conflict between means and ends. Can the means have worth if the ends have none? One could almost say the converse was true for the North: while the cause was, from our perspective, moral and correct (the union of the Nation, the destruction of slavery), the methods used to ensure this outcome were often just this side of butchery—witness Ulysses S. Grant, called in fact the Butcher by many, the “terrible mathematician”, as Shelby Foote put it in his narrative, who knew that the North’s advantages in population dictated that any casualty suffered on the Northern side could be replaced whereas any casualty on the Southern side could not, and proceeded accordingly, sending thousands to their deaths—so was it worth it? Most of us would, I think, argue that it was; the necessity of the Civil War is rarely questioned, except by the incessantly yearning Southern Lost Cause types who, rightly, engender nothing but the standard combination of pity and disgust whenever they try, yet again, to paper over the evil of slavery. It is true that bravery and courage are morally neutral values, of equal use to the hero and the villain, but it’s not necessary that we laud the aforementioned qualities when they are being used for evil purposes. Why should it be? In regards to Gray’s “mute and inglorious Miltons,” H.L. Mencken stated that the sound test of a Milton is that he function as a Milton—and courage, though it may indeed be so, is nevertheless wasted when put to the service of a poor cause. It is interesting, also, that very few will attempt to publicly admire the courage of the Nazis.

Civil War reenactments are often derided as pointless and embarrassing, just a few steps to the side of playing Dungeons and Dragons, LARPing, and other geeky activities. My own opinion on them wavers: what is their purpose, exactly? Is it to honor history, as is the commonly cited reason, or is it a clueless and vaguely fetishistic worship of the mere trappings of the Past, without true understanding, reminiscent of ‘70s dress-up nights, the current popular obsession with the novels of Jane Austen, and the Republican Party platform circa 2012? Think about what it must be like to travel across a field, or through a forest, both being shot at and shooting at others yourself. I have imagined this and my mind always centers on the weather at such times, the weather and the surroundings; whether it would be cold or warm, in what force the insects would eventually reveal themselves, whether it would be sunny or cloudy. But the reality of imminent death’s effect on the human soul I cannot truly imagine, and I think any attempt to truly do so, no matter how marred with foolish nostalgia it might be, is to be encouraged, not denigrated. For what is a reenactment, basically, but a grand collective stab at empathy?

Actually, maybe we can imagine it: imagine being shot at, imagine being shot at while trying to operate some ancient rifle, no streamlined automatic thing but a fussy construction of metal and wood that oftentimes didn’t work because of the dampness of the weather, the importance of the gun…but it was not the gun, in the end, that would most likely carry you off. The Civil War was a festival of disease. Imagine thousands of men out in the wilderness, in the cold, all of course having to eat and to shit, each different officer perhaps imposing his own level of discipline in regards to hygiene; imagine also the mental strain of wondering whether or not you were going to die tomorrow and how that would affect the aforementioned…I would expect that each man would deal with it in a different way, some in their fear ceasing to care about matters of cleanliness, others in their fear (because they all, in some way, must have been scared) attending to it with an assiduousness they had never possessed heretofore, in fact using the cleaning as a way to occupy the brain and stave off self-attention and its accompanying panic. The Confederates often went without food must have looked like bundles of sticks tanned and walking, the army’s poverty even precluding matching uniforms. And fighting for such a worthless idea. Imagine that.

Robert E. Lee was vaguely disgusted by slavery and was not a supporter of secession; these facts are often brought up in his defense, but when I came across them they had the opposite effect. It was only Lee’s military genius that kept the war going for as long as it did; were it not for him, the South would have likely been overrun within a year or two. Had it not been for this man, tens of thousands of the dead would not have been dead. And all for a cause—secession—he did not agree with, and did not really believe in. All, apparently, for honor. And yet I do not feel he was a bad man. The human desire to not be embarrassed—to not admit you were wrong—is far, far stronger than the human desire to live, else a great many more soldiers would have thrown their guns down.

The war has acquired a kind of romantic cast throughout the years; the words Glory and Honor are often invoked, and the affect of this is largely to gloss over the absolutely insane violence that was, and is, the most concrete and obvious fact about the Civil War; that half a million men died from battle or disease, half a million, a number that, I think, is almost impossible for us to imagine; death was everywhere; there was not a single family that escaped it; an entire generation of young men decimated and slaughtered; and it is the use of these words—Honor and Glory—just words!—that are supposed to render this insanity comprehensible, acceptable. For many of us, they did, and still do, today.