“We talk of peace and learning,” said Ruskin once in addressing
the cadets of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, “and of peace and
plenty, and of peace and civilization, but I found that those were not
the words which the muse of history coupled together, that on her lips
the words were peace and corruption, peace and death.” Hence this man of
peace glorified war after no doubt a very cursory examination of the
muse of history.”
War for a Certain Interpretation
“The surrender of the armies of Lee and Johnston brought the struggle
to an end. The South was crushed . . . “the ground of Virginia had been
kneaded with human flesh; its monuments of carnage, its spectacles of
desolation, it’s altars of sacrifice stood from the wheat fields of
Pennsylvania to the vales of New Mexico.” More than a billion dollars of
property in the South had been literally destroyed by the conflict.
The palpable tragedy of violent death had befallen the family circles
of the South’s patriotic not merely twice as frequently as in times of
peace, or three times as frequently, or even ten times, but a hundred
times as frequently. Within the space of four years was crowded the
sorrow of a century. Mourning for more than 250,000 dead on battlefield
or on the sea or in military hospitals was the ghastly heritage of the
war for the South’s faithful who survived. The majority of the dead were
mere boys.
Many strong men wept like children when they turned forever from the
struggle. As in rags they journeyed homeward toward their veiled and
stricken women they passed wearily among the flowers and the tender
grasses of the spring. The panoply of nature spread serenely over the
shallow trenches where lay the bones of unnumbered dead – sons, fathers,
brothers and one-time enemies of the living who passed.
War is at best a barbarous business. Among civilized men wars are
waged avowedly to obtain a better and more honorable peace. How often
the avowed objects are the true objects is open to question. Avowedly
the American Civil War was waged that a certain interpretation of the
federal Constitution might triumph.
To bring about such a triumph of interpretation atrocities were
committed in the name of right, invading armies ravaged the land, the
slave was encouraged to rise against his master, and he was declared to
be free.
“The end of the State is therefore peace,” concluded Plato in his
Laws – “the peace of harmony.” The gentle and reasonable man of today
has not progressed much beyond this concept. “War is eternal,” wrote
Plato “in man and the State.”
The American Civil war strangled the Confederacy and gave rebirth to
the United States. It brought forth a whole brood of devils and also
revealed many a worthy hero to both sections. Seen through the twilight
of the receding past a war is apt to take on a character different from
the grisly truth.”
(The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis, Columbia, 1913, pp. 319-322)
