Appomattox Through a Glass, Darkly : David Goldman
http://atimes.com/2015/04/appomattox-through-a-glass-darkly/
Fittingly, the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse fell on the sixth day of Passover, “the season of our freedom,” when Jews celebrate God’s eruption into human history to free them from Egyptian slavery. Appomattox denoted the end of the American Civil War, which claimed 750,000 lives. The equivalent number proportionate to today’s population would be 7 million. Understandably, Americans remain obsessed with the conflict, by far the bloodiest in our history.
The American Republic which the Civil War renewed, purged with blood of the stain of slavery, arose from a biblical vision of governance in the English Revolution of the 17th century, as Harvard’s Eric Nelson, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and others have shown.
For Jews, the primary goal of Passover observance is to make every Jew feel as if he personally had left Egypt with Moses and stood before Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. With respect to our Civil War, many Americans yearn to feel like participants. Europeans do not reenact the great battles of their wars, but thousands of Americans don blue and gray, learn to fire muzzle-loaders, and camp on the battlefields of the Civil War.
But for all the reenactments, films, books, ceremonies and memorabilia, Americans cannot place themselves inside the minds of the men who sacrificed themselves with such terrible abandon. Visitors to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington stare at the chiseled words of the Second Inaugural Address on the marble walls with as much comprehension as American tourists viewing hieroglyphs at Abu Simbel.
Our past may be lost to us, a matter of remote myth like the battles of the “fair-haired Achaians” in the eyes of contemporary Greeks. Perhaps we have become a different, lesser people, staring without comprehension at the relics of the race of giants that inhabited this land a century and a half ago. Perhaps we still can return to the moral grandeur of the generation of 1861. I do not know.
For black Americans, the Exodus once was their story as well, and their identification with the people of Israel persisted through the impassioned Zionism of Dr. Martin Luther King. It is a tragedy for African-Americans that black churches eschewed their affinity for Israel in favor of a variant of liberation theology that suborns Jesus of Nazareth’s testimony into an assertion ofblack Chosenness—for example, President Obama’s longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago.
Black liberation theology as taught by the Rev. Wright’s mentor James Cone claims that “Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors.” It is the old ethnocentric heresy that infected and nearly killed Christianity in Europe wrapped in the robes of a fight for freedom. Black theology substitutes rancor, resentment and rage for faith, hope and charity, and its consequences for black Americans have been baleful.
The white churches, though, were three generations ahead of the black churches in distancing themselves from the dangerous passions of the Civil War. When Julia Ward Howe of blessed memory sang in”The Battle Hymn of the Republic” of “grapes of wrath,” she invoked the terrible words of Isaiah 63, in which God comes from Edom with his garments stained red, saying, “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.” By the turn of the 20th century, the apocalyptic Protestantism of what Lincoln called an “almost-chosen people” had turned into Social Gospel and universal salvation.
The Civil War was a holy war against evil, a Crusade to free the slaves.For the likes of Barack Obama, who equated Christian violence with the recent atrocities of the Islamic State, this should be a cognitive dissonance: the last and bloodiest war fought under the banner of Christianity was fought to free slaves. It might not have been so at the beginning; it began as a war to suppress a rebellion and preserve the Union. But hundreds of thousands of men do not leave their farms and workshops and their wives and children and give their lives with such abandon except for a higher purpose.
John Courtney Murray’s concept of America as a “propositional nation” is surely true in a sense; Lincoln called America a nation “dedicated to a proposition” in his Gettysburg address. But this designation is far too thin: Masses of men do not die for a proposition, but because their hearts pound and their blood surges. America was not merely propositional but also impassioned. What were their passions? Can we evoke them from the dust of long-quiet battlefields and feel them again? I do not think we ever shall.
We see the world through different eyes and hear it through different ears. Even their songs sound different to us. That is not a small matter; to understand the passions that drive men into battle, one has to hear what they are singing. The South sang “We are a band of brothers/Native to the soil/Fighting for the property/We gained by honest toil.” Of course, they were not brothers; they were arrivistes rather than native; and they stole the property (human beings) rather than earned it. But that is what they fought for. The Union sang the apocalyptic vision of Isaiah, trampling the nations like grapes in a wine vat.
Leave aside the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with its openly biblical imagery and self-consciously prophetic voice. A less exalted musical example illustrates the point:
As background music to Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, released a generation ago but still a standard in popular historiography, the Civil War song “Year of Jubilo” is heard as background music, played in folk-song style with a simple chordal accompaniment, like this:
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