"Barkesdale's Charge"
On July 2,1863, Gen. William Barksdale's brigade, the 17th Mississippi, descended on the Union position in the Peach Orchard bordering Gettysburg's Emmitsburg Road.
Frances
Parkman was a militant New England war hawk who disliked the black man
but considered the Boston aristocracy superior to the Southern
leadership, though it must emulate the military expertise exhibited by
Southern men. The Brahmin class may have indeed been tested by the
battles Parkman lists, but they were no great victories. At Ball’s
Bluff, for example, Northern scouts mistook a row of trees as
Confederate tents and the nearby 17th Mississippi delivered the Brahmins a severe thrashing while their regiments assaulted the “tents.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Patriotic Brahmin Manhood Beneath a Surface of Froth and Scum:
“Parkman
had always detested the abolitionists, and he had little concern for
the Negro, but he was [Col. Robert Gould] Shaw’s cousin, and he took
great pride in later years pointing this out to distant correspondents.
One suspects, however, that he was almost ashamed that Shaw led Negroes
[of the 54th Massachusetts], since he never mentioned this fact.
[In]
two letters [of November 1862], he further developed the odd propaganda
line that the best way to whip the South was to emulate certain aspects
of its civilization. He went from praising the military education of
the Southern aristocrat to praising his political education. Compared to
the North, where an “organized scramble of mean men for petty spoils”
had driven the better elements from politics, the South had made
politics “a battleground” for the well-born, “where passion,
self-interest, self-preservation, urge to [the most intense] action
every power of their nature.” This explained “the vigor of their
development.”
By
comparison, the education of Northern gentlemen had been too academic.
Now, however, the war was altering the picture. The South, which had
identified the North with three classes: the merchants, the politicians
and the “abolitionist agitators” and therefore, with “extravagance,
fanaticism and obstreperous weakness,” was learning how, “under a
surface of froth and scum, the great national heart still beat with the
pulsations of patriotic manhood.” In other words, they underestimated
the ability of the Northern gentry to adapt to military life.
It
was in his letter of July 21, 1863, published only three days after the
death of Shaw, that Parkman revealed most fully what was really on his
mind. Repeating his charge that “the culture of the nation” had become a
“political nullity,” Parkman referred specifically to the “Brahmin
cast”, which had “yielded a progeny of gentlemen and scholars since the
days of the Puritans,” but had “long since ceased to play any active
part in the dusty arena of political turmoil.”
This
class, however, had at last found an outlet for its energies. Brahmins
had been tested in battle at places like Ball’s Bluff, Antietam,
Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg and removed all doubts about their vigor
and character. Pointing to the “necrology” of Harvard University” as an
example to the nation, Parkman clearly suggested that the American
people had no further excuse for rejecting the political and social
authority of what was now a tried and true aristocracy. Perhaps a
patrician could finally say that the age of “ultra-democratic fallacies”
was coming to an end.
There
were very genteel New Englanders who professed to see the war as a
vindication of democracy and egalitarianism. Charles Eliot Norton and
others claimed that their wavering belief in democracy had been revived
by the proofs of obedience and endurance shown by the common people and
by the Negroes in the struggle.
It
depended on the preservation of the model which had been suggested by
the assault on Fort Wagner. If the “inferior elements,” whether Negro or
white, consented to be led by “the best culture [of aristocratic New
England],” then their rights were assured; if however, they struck out
in directions of their own, democracy and equality might again be
questioned.”
(The
Inner Civil War, Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union,
George M. Frederickson, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 161-165)
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