READING: U.S. Grant: Personal Memoirs :: Chapter 68
Humanity’s bravery & sacrifice & divinity’s vengeance & wrath, Grant & Lee, sorrowful victory & unacknowledged defeat at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865…
Here we have U.S. Grant:
U.S. Grant: Personal Memoirs <https://archive.org/details/personalmemoirs01gran> <archive.org/details/p…: ‘What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result. and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us…
U. S. Grant here sharply distinguishes between the (awful, criminal, in)justice of a cause and the (praiseworthy, to the extent that participation in the human—or should I say human male?—societal practice of war can ever worth praise) valor of those who fought for it. This is not, or is not merely, an exercise in Victorian magnanimity. It is one of the curses of the human condition. We see this, for example, in literature from the beginning. Consider ‘Omeros and his great poem Rage Be Now Your Song, Muse…. In it, Akhilleus and Agamemnon are definitely heroes—exhibiting excellence, arete, in an extreme, noble, and admirable form. But Akhilleus and Agamemnon are also tremendously stupid testosterone-addled devil-ape monsters. They wreak destruction and chaos: “doomed and ruinous… caused the Akhaians loss on hitter loss and crowded brave souls into the undergloom, leaving so many dead men—carrion for dogs and birds…”.
And it is not even for their own ultimate advantage. Both wind up very dead as the not-unjust consequence of their rage-filled deeds. They both, very unwisely, as Akhilleus judges Agamemnon and can certainly be rightly judged in turn, “know… not at all [how] to look both backwards and forwards in time, so that his Akhaians might wage war securely besides their ships…”
Grant’s lack of elation and sense of the sorrow and the pity is an acknowledgement of the deep structural forces that mobilize societies for this particular societal practice, sweeping up the “great mass” of the population in a tide of sincere but misdirected loyalty. Grant’s melancholy, then, is not simply personal but historical: it is the sadness of one who recognizes that the costs of war are paid by those least responsible for its origins, and that the meaning of victory is always shadowed by the suffering it entails.
The Confederacy’s cause, as he observes, was indefensible: it was, in essence, a desperate bid to preserve a slave-based social order in the face of modernity’s onrushing tide. Yet the societal machinery of the South, like that of so many doomed regimes, was able to mobilize extraordinary resources, loyalty, and endurance. Here we see, once again, that sincerity and sacrifice are not sufficient to redeem an unjust structure.
And the end of the Civil War did not, in fact, inaugurate a utopia: Grant’s presidency picked up the threads of Reconstruction four years late, and failed. The postbellum South’s economic and racial hierarchies were much less vicious than those that had underpinned the antebellum South, but they were still plenty vicious.
Plus the cost of the Civil War was truly appalling. 4 million slaves were freed, or rather given one kind of (semi-)freedom. But the cost was 700,000 young men dead—400,000 blue, 300,000 grey—prematurely, most of them dying in great pain, killed in battle, expiring afterwards of wounds, or shitting their guts out from dysentery. One for every six. Plus the treasure—the resources—spent on and dissipated during the Civil War could, applied differently, have bought the freedom of every single slave in the United States at peak-boom prices, plus purchased 40 acres and a mule for every slave family, and more.
I do believe the cost of the Civil War drove Abe Lincoln mad with grief.
As of his Second Inaugural Address, he was seeing the enormous cost of the Civil War as the planned, deliberate, and conscious vengeance of the LORD on America:
Abraham Lincoln (1865): Second Inaugural Address <https://archive.org/details/lincolnssecondin00linc>: ‘Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…
It was so paid.
And Lincoln found that vengeance righteous and deserved—deserved by Union and Confederate states and people alike:
Abraham Lincoln (1865): Second Inaugural Address <https://archive.org/details/lincolnssecondin00linc>: “[…then,] as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether”…
I could say more. I actually have an outline, with bullet points. But I do not have the heart to fill it in:
The defeat of an unjust cause does not guarantee the rapid or non-rapidconstruction of a just order.
The work of social reconstruction is rarely finished on the battlefield.
Institutions and social hierarchies often survive their formal abolition, adapting to new realities.
Sincerity and sacrifice in pursuit of a cause do not redeem the injustice of that cause.
Historical memory is shaped by present needs as much as by past facts.
Material wealth is very compatible with profound dissatisfaction and discord.
The historian—and the citizen—must distinguish between sentimental narratives and structural realities.
References:
Grant, Ulysses Simpson. 1885–1886. Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: In Two Volumes. New York: C.L. Webster. <https://archive.org/details/personalmemoirs01gran> <archive.org/details/p…>.
Lincoln, Abraham. 1865. “Second Inaugural Address”. Washington, DC. <https://archive.org/details/lincolnssecondin00linc>.
Ober, Josiah. 2022. The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. <https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520380165/the-greeks-and-the-rational>.
‘Omeros. ca. -700. Rage Be Now Your Song. Muse… <https://archive.org/details/iliadofhomerdone00homeuoft>.
Ransom, Roger & Richard Sutch. 2001. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. <https://archive.org/details/onekindoffreedom00rans>.