Mark Twain on the War of Northern Aggression ;)
Written by YellowJacket on July 13th, 2007We haven’t had a Civil War discussion here in a while, but I found this quote of Mark Twain’s regarding the Southern view of the Civil War to be very close to my feelings about the topic:
The hearts of this whole nation, North and South, were in the war. We of the South were not ashamed of the part we took. We believed in those days we were fighting for the right - and it was a noble fight, for we were fighting for our sweethearts, our homes, and our lives. Today we no longer regret the result, today we are glad that it came out as it did, but we of the South are not ashamed that we made an endeavor. And you, too, are proud of the record we made.
We are here to honor the noblest and the best man after Washington that this land, or any other land, has yet produced. When the great conflict began the soldiers from the North and South swung into line to the tune of that same old melody, ‘We are coming. Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong.’ The choicest of the young and brave went forth to fight and shed their blood under the flag and for what they thought was right. They endured hardships equivalent to circumnavigating the globe four or five times in the olden days. They suffered untold hardships and fought battles night and day.
The old wounds are healed, and you of the North and we of the South are brothers yet. We consider it to be an honor to be of the soldiers who fought for the Lost Cause, and now we consider it a high privilege to be here tonight and assist in laying our humble homage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln. And we do not forget that you of the North and we of the South, one-time enemies, can now unite in singing that great hymn, “America.”
While I’m not in agreement with Lincoln being the “noblest and best man after Washington” bit, I think Twain makes an eloquent description of the war and the goals and views of both sides (self determination and states’ rights versus preserving the Union). I find people who say simply that the “war was about slavery,” and take the simplistic view that it was Northern abolitionists against Southern racists to be incredibly ignorant of history. They don’t know that the Emancipation Proclamation was an economic document that only freed slaves in Confederacy-held territories - not those slave-owning areas under control of the Union. I could go on all day here, but I want to see what others have to offer about the deadliest war in American history.
H/T to Power Line, which is where I saw the Mark Twain quote.
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PM
Langley, you are correct that most of those fighting the war, the citizen-soldiers South, did not see themselves by and large fighting for slavery. But the political debate preceding the Civil War was about whether or not slavery would be extended into the Federal territories. Read some newspapers from the 1850s–not some sentimentalization following the war–and you’ll see as much in a second.
Lincoln’s pre-war policy sought nothing more than to keep slavery limited to the states where it already existed, thus ensuring its ultimate extinction. He was not an abolitionist before the war and never came to be. He was anti-slavery.
Southern secessionists argued that the Federal government had no legal right to restrict slavery in the Federal territories, despite the Constitution granting the Federal government the right to organize and administrate territories. This argument was radical and absurd, given the fact that the Northwest Ordinance–passed by the 1st Federal Congress and signed by George Washington banned slavery from the Northwest territories.
And, as a brief examination of any of Lincoln’s writings or a reading of the Constitution would show you, Lincoln did not free slaves in Union-controlled lands because he had no Constitutional authority to do so. States had the right, as granted by the Constitution, to have slavery, but under Lincoln had the war powers authority to strike at insurrectionists ability to wage war, which was greatly aided by the slave labor of 4 million people held in bondage. This could only be viewed as an economic document
And if you don’t believe that Lincoln cared about freedom for the slaves, then read Lincoln and Black Freedom, which documents his efforts to pass the 13th amendment.