Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1963 | Volume 14, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June 1963 | Volume 14, Issue 4
But it is easy to become very fuzzy-minded about American traditions. They deal with what the American people do when they are doing their best, and they can bring together a descendant of John Alden and an heir of Ellis Island to the benefit of everyone concerned, but they can also be unformulated until what one lone man has in his heart becomes expressed in action. The things that make democracy work are uncatalogued and various, and now and then they arise from the faith of the individual citizen.
There was the case of Robert E. Lee …
Only insolent ignorance would present Lee as an exemplar of the democratic tradition. Lee was an aristocrat who had very little use for democracy, and he devoted immense talents to the task of destroying the government that the democracy had established. In the end he failed, a great soldier brought down by forces that opposed everything he stood for; but finally, after the defeat, he rendered an immense service both to the people he had fought for and the people he had fought against, and became a great exemplar of one of the traditions without which democracy could not exist.
Lee’s military career has been studied in detail, by experts, most notably and recently by Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman and Dr. Clifford Dowdey, and nothing of any consequence that has not already been said remains to be presented about his achievements as a soldier. But what he did after the Civil War ended has a peculiar and often unrecognized importance, and this part of his career is presented now in Lee After the War by Marshall W. Fishwick.
In a foreword Mr. Fishwick remarks that “It is not the story of Lee, but the meaning of Lee, that I am writing about,” and the meaning of Lee goes beyond the warrior and the legendary hero and comes down to something basic.
Appomattox was a beginning rather than an ending. The two sections of a broken country had fought for four years, and they had fought hard, leaving dreadful scars; Appomattox had determined that they were going to be joined together again, but it had said nothing about how this was to be done, and an objective appraisal of the situation in the spring of 1865 would have concluded that the job ahead was going to be extremely difficult if not altogether impossible. As Mr. Fishwick says, “The spirit of rebellion would smolder for years to come. Violence would continue and spread. For every American as magnanimous as Lee or Lincoln, there would be ten filled with vengeance and hatred.”
Lee After the War , by Marshall W. Fishwick. Dodd, Mead & Co. 242 pp. $4.00.
The simple fact is that the problem could easily have become insoluble. The defeated South could have become another Ireland or another Poland, a permanently indigestible lump that