by John C. Chalberg
Yes, April, 1865 was the “month that saved America,” because it was the month that saved the Union. That judgment will no doubt anger some Chestertonians. If so, those same Chestertonians will have to take up their differences not just with Mr. Winik, but with Mr. Chesterton as well. After all, Chesterton thought that the America of 1865 deserved to be saved, his admiration for the American South in general and Robert E. Lee in particular notwithstanding. But he thought something else as well. He also thought that, Civil War or no, there was an America that simply could not be lost.
Chesterton, of course, was a great admirer of Lincoln as well. More than that, he saw nothing contradictory about his holding both Lincoln and Lee in high esteem. Neither does Jay Winik. And therein lies a good deal of the wonder in this wonderful book.
Winik’s history is filled with near misses and near-villains. The nearest of those misses concerned the possibility of the Confederacy launching a guerrilla war that could have lasted for years. If Winik is right, and I think he is, such a war was a real possibility. Certainly, it was much more than an idle thought in the mind of Winik’s chief near-villain, Jefferson Davis.
In the end there was no such war, and even Davis comes off reasonably well in Winik’s even-handed treatment. To be sure, Lee and even Sherman come off better, the former because he used his considerable stature to block the guerrilla alternative, and the latter because he was prepared to offer conciliatory terms to the South that he had just devastated.
Lincoln, it must be said, comes off the best of all. He knew that the South had been devastated and defeated; but he also knew that it had not been conquered. Hence came his determination to take a conciliatory approach to peace. Furthermore, as Chesterton reminds us, Lincoln was man of “southern connections and considerable southern sympathy.” So was Sherman, whom Winik portrays as hating the abolitionists much more than he could ever have imagined hating the Confederacy—and possibly even more than he hated war itself.
Winik has done a marvelous job of capturing the tension, the confusion, and the tragedy of the final days of this most terrible of America’s wars. In the process he seeks to remind us that things did not have to turn out the way that they did, even as he breathes a sigh of relief at the result. Here Winik the dramatist and Winik the historian are somewhat at odds. On the one hand, he wants to suggest that his story might have turned out differently than it did. Having taken us back to April, 1865, he wants his reader to experience the uncertainty of that crucial moment in American history. On the other hand, he knows what Chesterton knew, namely that all along there was never “really a northern nation and a southern nation, but one American nation.”
Chesterton made a similar point when he noted that the “most chivalric champion of states’ rights never really felt that Massachusetts or Old Virginia was a sovereign nation in the sense of France or Russia.” He simply refused to believe there was “one poor, gallant, ragged ‘Reb’ or ‘Yank’ who did not know he was an American.”
In the days following September 11 President Bush was spotted with a copy of Winik’s book under his arm. In its own way, this is reassuring, even though we are only at the beginning of what might yet be America’s most terrible war since the Civil War. After all, this is a president whose natural humility can only be reinforced by reading this humbling tale of American leaders, especially men of deep humility, most especially American leaders named Lincoln and Lee.
Come April, 1865, General Lee may have been ready to throw in the towel, but he was not ready to cease being a Southerner. Nor was he ready to cease being an American. What he was prepared to do was to play a role in the mostly civil process of making a post-Civil War peace that would reaffirm the existence of an America that would not die. And here we are at the beginning of a new century and a new war rediscovering that there is still an America to be defended, and even saved, all of the prattling of all of the globalists, multiculturalists, and diversity-mongers notwithstanding.
(This article courtesy of Gilbert!, The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton.)
