The conservatives’ favorite ideologue (excuse me, “historian”)

Without my being aware of it, my blood pressure must have needed a spike, because I semi-consciously clicked on Victor Hanson’s weekly therapy session (excuse me, opinion column) at NRO. It was his usual impassioned rallying of the universal-democratist (excuse me, “conservative”) troops not to give up on the democratizing of Iraq and of the world, which I found to be unreadable and soon gave up on. However, in the midst of a typical Hansonian litany of the hardships and achievements of America’s past wars, this caught my eye:

It was not only Lincoln’s gifted rhetoric that got the Union through Cold Harbor and the Wilderness, but after the war’s initial months of hard fighting, his reinvention of the North’s very aims, from a utilitarian struggle to restore the United States to a moral crusade to end slavery and the power of the plantationists for good. In that effort, he was willing to suspend habeas corpus, sidestep the Congress, and govern large chunks of the border states through martial law.

As low as my opinion of Hanson is, I’m stunned that he would go so low as to describe the struggle to preserve the United States, a cause for which 350,000 Union soldiers died, as “utilitarian.” At the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., on the wall behind Lincoln’s head, are carved these stirring words:

In this temple, as in the hearts of the people
for whom he saved the Union, the memory
of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.

This is what Hanson calls a utilitarian cause? Or what about the famous letter by Union soldier Sullivan Ballou, written to his wife on July 14, 1861, a year and a half before the Emancipation Proclamation?

If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt….

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

All the joys of life Ballou was willing to surrender to help defend his country and his civilization from destruction. His heartbreakingly noble sentiments had nothing to do with ending slavery.

Or consider William T. Sherman’s June 1864 letter, a year and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, to a young Southern woman he had known years earlier when he was her parents’ guest in their Charleston, South Carolina home:

Whether I shall live to see this period [of peace] is problematical, but you may, and may tell your mother and sisters that I never forgot one kind look or greeting, or ever wished to efface its remembrance, but putting on the armor of war I did it that our common country should not perish in infamy and disgrace.

Sherman, like almost all men in the Union army both before and after the Emancipation Proclamation, was fighting to save the United States from dismemberment, not to rid the country of slavery. Ending slavery became an important war objective over time, but was never the primary objective. But Hanson, this hyped-up liberal fanatic, is incapable of relating to the Civil War on the mere basis of national defense, national existence, and national survival. Oh, no, such concerns are too mundane for him. For a liberal ideologue such as Hanson, only a liberal goal, equality, can give the war a moral meaning. And so he shamelessly distorts history to make it fit his ideology. In the effort to end slavery, he writes, Lincoln was willing to take such extreme measures as “suspend habeas corpus, sidestep the Congress, and govern large chunks of the border states through martial law.”

In reality, Lincoln initiated these and other strong measures early in the war, before the abolition of slavery had even become a war objective. He did them to save the Union. In 1861, he even commanded General Frémont, who had ordered the freeing of the slaves in the border state of Missouri, to retract the order, because attacking slavery there would alienate the crucial border states and lose the war. But what do liberal ideologues (excuse me, “conservatives”) care about historical truth?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 24, 2005 06:52 PM | Send