Today marks the defeat of General Robert E. Lee to U.S. Grant. Lee was a gentleman and there is much to admire about him. One of those things is not the cause he used his massive intelligence to defend.
The great rebellion against the Republic was effectively crushed by Mr. Lincoln today and the world was a better place. The Civil War was a just war that ended a great evil and secured for the United States a national indentity. It was a great and noble victory, even if some of the good of it was frittered away.
The great pity is that the “radical” Republicans did not win and press for a full Reconstruction.
There should have been a more powerful Freedman’s Bureau. Great good would have done if the United States army had not withdrawn too quickly in a sordid political deal. If instead more schools had been built, land justly seized from rebels had been given to their freed slaves, and terrorists such as the Klan had been crushed, the nation would have been better served.
Still, men are not angels and the North paid a horrific price to end slavery in blood and treasure. Men will always grow tired of doing good and press for hasty withdrawals and mutter under their breath that the oppressed are not worth the cost of freeing them.
The victory of U.S. Grant was not as complete as it could have been if Reconstruction had been handled well, but he was not the first military genius whose victory has been wasted, or nearly wasted, by politicians later. (Since he became a politician, some of the guilt is his, though his record is better than most on Reconstruction.)
So joy must be tempered by the reality of the unfinished (and botched) business of 1865. Still the partial victory remains a great victory for the Union, Christian civilization, and liberty.
Otherwise good people, even people very involved in the Civil Rights movement like Sheldon Vanauken, have defended the Confederate cause. To those folk, the Confederate States of America was not a nation founded on slavery, but on states rights and liberty.
To which I politely say, “Nonsense.” The wealth of the South was based on the blood of men and women cruelly ripped from their homes, transported in horrific conditions to a new world, and worked as if they were animals. It was a horrid and barbaric “peculiar institution” far worse than the economic slavery of ancient times, because it denied the essential humanity of the slave.
That it was lamely justified by religion and by appeals to liberty is simply monstrous. In the ethical education of mankind, the time was long past when any ignorance about slavery or human dignity was justifiable and behaving worse than men had behaved one thousand years before (instead of better) was disgusting.
Libertarian principles and Christian ethics have nothing to do with a culture of race based slavery. Soiling both causes in an attempt to defend slavery was not the least of the Confederate’s crimes.
So today all lovers of liberty and all Christians should raise a toast to the brave lads of Mr. Lincoln’s army. We sorrow for our misguided brothers and sisters who defended tyranny and disunion, but we rejoice that the Grand Army of the Republic helped them see the light.
My family will say a few prayers of thanksgiving today for the victory of Grant’s army. It is good to remember the good days in history. I am proud of the fact that all my ancestors who could fight did fight for the Union and the end of slavery. As my grandfather put it growing up, “When Virginia seceded from the Union, we seceded from Virginia.”
May their souls and those of all the faithful departed rest in peace.