Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys Thursday, October 16, 2003

The last time I wrote about William T. Sherman I was thirteen years old. As a final history project, we were assigned to write essays on the Civil War; I took the March and ran with it. I grabbed the first book I could find from the Jackson Heights Public, cribbed a few anecdotes and wrote a short story about one of the soldiers marching under Uncle Billy. Anticipating my essay about the a-bomb six years later, I wrote a real weepie about how awful it was the country was being torn and how lousy the whole business of war was. Sherman helped my case by coining "War is hell."

I never read the context of that quote, or anything else the general or his men had to say about his effort. Victor Hanson, in the book I mentioned below, fills in the gaps. And once again, I'm astonished at the depths of my ignorance--not to mention arrogance. Sherman, as Hanson paints him, knew full well that by destroying property and hauling off swag he was raising war to a whole other level--this wasn't two armies grinding each others up, it was one army destroying the very heart of the opposition's homeland. But he also knew that it was necessary to do this, to inflict on the South the horror they had inflicted on countless Africans and make them see the hollowness of their mannered society. He transmitted this idea and his fervor to his men, who came to see themselves on a crusade.

But hey. What did Sherman have to teach me? I'd seen "MASH." The only heroes in a war were the ones who subverted the kooky generals who wanted Hill 765, for no particular reason. Commies, precious bodily fluids, etc. Guys who want to put men into the meat grinder--bad. Guys who want to talk problems through--good.

The thing is, there's a point where talk breaks down. Peace is a parenthesis, one of the epigrammists said; ultimately, even the best causes sometimes have to be driven home with force. There was nothing nobler than abolitionism. But the Ashleys and Scarletts weren't about to slap their foreheads and say, "I declare! That gentleman from Lexington, Mass., may just have a point!" Sherman (a Gen Xer, as a certain friend of mine would want me to point out) took the rhetoric and turned it into action. The abolitionists harangued the South to remember Heaven; Sherman showed them Hell. Which one worked?

As I said below, it was a Hanson essay that helped scotch a friendship for me. I knew the friend for over ten years, and we'd been through a lot. I thought we'd weather our disagreements. But by the time he read the Hanson piece things had deteriorated to the point that he said it reminded him of Nazi propaganda; and then he compared me to Josef Goebbels. That's when you know you have to reach for your hat.

I've wished a lot of things since then. I was stupid and strident and didn't stick up for my side well enough. Now I wish I had read these Hanson books when we had those fights. There's no way you can read Hanson's sheer exuberance at the force of a democratic army to liberate a slave state--or free the Spartan's vassals--and call him a fascist. There's no way you can feel his disgust for elitism, and pomp, and gentility, pouring out of every line of prose, and think he's a blinkered elitist. It's impossible to read his accounts of heroism and the ideals that inspired it without feeling a tremble just behind your eyes.

The quote below from Hanson, which I had hoped would be obvious, probably isn't. Hanson is a democrat, both little-d and capital-D, and believes that the best political combination you can have is a radical egalitarian who nonetheless respects the best of tradition. I wish I could have told my friend that: He, like me, was half-right--but we were starting from opposite sides, like the two trains in the story problems.

To paraphrase Dr. Percy, together we might've saved politics. Instead we lost it.

@ 2:22:00 PM,

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