There was plenty of that, to be sure, but there was plenty more as well. For starters, I cannot make up my mind about Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipation Proclamation seems to have been put forth out of convenience more than anything you might call moral or ethical. What’s interesting though is that the northern folks – they were the enlightened side, as we all know – objected to the proclamation strenuously when they realized that it had become the war’s centerpiece. So much so that there was quite a movement in support of pulling out of the war unless he cancelled it, to which Abraham Lincoln said, no. I’m not sure if I consider that heroic. I suppose it is decent, though.
That’s my anti-North slam. On the anti-South side, here’s a good one. Many Southerners who happened to be in New York City protested because, according to them, the war was hurting the south far more than it was hurting the north. And I thought that causing problems – such as basing an economy on the right to own other human beings – and then racing for and clenching the victim medal was something more of our era.
I was completely entranced in a way that even I found alarming by the eyes of Robert E. Lee. Walt Whitman wrote during the war that Lincoln’s face was so complex that it beckoned the talent of the portrait artists from two or three centuries before, but Lee’s face, man, someone nailed that one. And nicely. The care with which the surrender and the dignity on display from both sides was orchestrated and recorded was intriguing to me. There was something inherently civil about it, not the least of which was that Robert E. Lee, unlike Ulysses S. Grant, dressed for the occasion.
All of this, though, falls flat alongside what I thought were the stars of the show: The letters. They were so beautifully written and recalled a language that existed in a state of grace I’ve never known but have certainly dreamed of. I hit rewind many times so I that I could listen again, and in a couple of instances I listened three or four times.
I didn’t live in the era, of course, but from what I could tell the Civil War was debated and considered and reported in vivid detail in the newspapers. This may be due to geographical immediacy and the fact that there was more at stake. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that even though there were no computers or cell phones, it seems to me that people knew more of the world in which they lived. The number of dead that comes to mind is 800,000, a figure that – and pardon me for saying this – puts another, more recent national calamity into its proper perspective, and by that I mean makes it a shadow at best. And speaking of perspective, as coincidence would have it, I finished the series on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night the CBS Evening News reported that the war in Iraq – the price tag of which is well over $800 billion – is indeed over. But it was the third story of the newscast, preceded by some new bipartisan come-to-Jesus monkey business about Medicare and word that the governor of Iowa isn’t sure that Newt Gingrich is suited for the presidency.
