You would think that after all that they would have just all gone home. What a horrible war. We soon get to relive it. The Sesquicentennial is almost upon us and I feel a strong wave of depression coming over me.
This month’s issue (actually it might say August 2011) of Smithsonian Magazine features The Battle of Bull Run: The End of Illusions on the cover. The article, written by Ernest B. Furguson, begins:
Both North and South expected victory to be glorious and quick, but the first major battle signaled the long and deadly war to come.
To those of us who are local, the article was not particularly revealing but the fact that it was about our area and about an event we have been anticipating for several years makes the article a must-read. It provided an excellent in-depth coverage for a nation that also commemorates the most dreadful period in our nation’s history.
The longer I live the more horrible that war becomes to me. I fear too many people will celebrate. There is nothing to celebrate other than death and destruction of property, stock and human beings. So I will be a grouch and stay home.
Will anyone be going to most of the events? Will the county and City make profits on the events? Will we be overrun with visitors?
Further reading: The Battle of Bull Run: The End of Illusions
Music on the battlefield. Reminds me of a story I heard long ago of a Christmas Eve in France during World War I. A blanket of snow over the countryside. The Germans in their trenches. The Allied troops —American or Brit, I cannot remember which — in theirs. A brief truce had been called out of respect for the Christmas season. In the darkness, someone in the Allied trenches began to sing “Silent Night, Holy Night.” As the music spread along the trenches, there came from the German side the same song in their own language. For just a brief time there was Peace on Earth. Afterwards, they went back to killing each other.
They were SOOOOO close to ending that war then.
Moon — I can understand how you feel. It was a terrible and bloody war. We often celebrate the grand aspects of it, sort of glorifying the sound of the call to arms, with the battle flags flying, the bands playing, and the recall of many examples of individual and group heroism. The further we get from it in time, the less we think about the blood and the slaughter and the grief and the destruction.
The question arises as to whether that war was inevitable. I myself believe that it was destiny. We created a republic with flaws that had to be resolved some day by a people torn between their ideals and reality. We have also been a stubborn and proud people, slow to bend and change of our own accord, making a strife such as this one virtually preordained, a baptism of fire in a fire created by ourselves.
Perhaps the only way to celebrate or honor such an horrific event of the past is to try to separate the event as a whole from the individuals who were a part of it. There is an old adage among genealogists: “You are who you were.” If you are a Southerner born and bred, you are likely the descendant of people who believed so much in themselves and a cause that they were willing to go into battle wearing uniforms in tatters and even barefooted, hungry and perhaps ill, possibly realizing deep in their hearts that the cause was being lost but so full of pride that they could not stand down in the face of the foe, that even the thought of death did not make them shirk their duty. And when your commander surrendered at last at Appomattox, you wept even as you prepared to go home alive to see your family once again.
If you were a farmboy from Iowa or Minnesota or a city kid, perhaps a son of Irish immigrants, you put on the blue uniform and, even though not happy about the prospect of death in this God awful carnage, you still stood as strong as you could at places of which you had never heard before, like Shiloh or Pea Ridge or Chickamauga or a small, inconsequential village called Gettysburg. And, if you survived it all and were able to go home, you knew that you had accomplished something which would be remembered for all time.
“You are what you were.” I like to think that those Southern lads in tattered rags and those Northern boys in blue have come back many times over the years, no longer separated but together. They were at San Juan Hill, at the Marne and at Belleau Wood, at Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima, at Inchon and the Chosun Reservoir, at Khe San and Chu Lai, at Baghdad and in Afghanistan. What was in those boys in Blue and Gray survived them and, in my opinion, was transferred over the decades into us, their literal and figurative descendants. They gave us a heritage of pride and determination. So, perhaps, instead of remembering the Civil War per se as an event, we ought instead to celebrate the individual men and women who gave us such a heritage of strength and courage. They are no longer dressed in blue or gray. They are us because we are what we were.
You should publish that, Wolverine. I am serious.
And I was a mix. Very strong southern side and the side I know the most about. Not sure what the northern side did. We never knew them all that well or much about them. My father came south and became an adopted son of Virginia. My mother’s great grandfather was a Civil War vet stationed in Yorktown. He was older. 35 or so. He wasn’t in long. (otherwise we might not be having this conversation) My mother’s grandfather sure kept it alive and she and the other grandchildren were thrashed if they said Abraham Lincoln. It was a cuss word.
Mother absorbed a lot of what her grandfather said. He was a young teenager when Custer came through Rio Mills where he lived. Mother talked about what she had heard as a kid. Back then I guess they all sat around and shot the bull since there was no TV. I think that the feelings will be gone with my generation–those personal feelings. When my generation is gone, there will be no direct links. No one will have known anyone from that time. I was pushing it with my grandfather. He was very old and I was very young.
Certainly what kids are taught in school today doesn’t match what has been handed down in the oral tradition or what was written.
Volunteer training tonight at 7 pm at City Hall for those who would like to help at City sesquicentennial events during July 21-24. I haven’t heard of anyone celebrating, just those working their dogs off to get opportunities to witness and learn out there. Help us make this a safe four days and volunteer.
If prepublicity is any indication, there will be a lot of people. We printed 5,000 extra copies of the June Town Hall newsletter and they are gone already. Just delivered another 10,000 copies today. That’s in addition to the 16,000 that went to every household/business in the City in their utility bills.