[percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War

Beck, David A dabeck at iupui.edu
Mon Jun 23 10:22:17 EDT 2014


Janet,

I didn't post that to start a political discussion. It was more in line 
with, What would Percy say about contemporary America? The passage to 
which I was referring has the protagonist (Tom More) questioning 
whether our luck has run out or God's blessings are over.

While I certainly have a more cynical interpretation of our "freedom 
fighting" than you do, I don't really want to discuss it on this list. 
And I don't want to agree or disagree that "America represents  the 
goodies and not the cancer." I think it's more complicated than that. 
Regardless, I didn't mean to offend but just wanted to throw out a 
Percean passage that seems to relate to the discussion.

Peace.
-David

Quoting janetcantor37--- via Percy-L <percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>:

> David,
> I know the Percy Lists are supposed to try to avoid the political but
> you offered the Percy quote in response to my comment and I feel a
> need to have my say. I find it interesting that Coriolanus, my
> favorite Shakespeare play, is used by both goodies and baddies to
> justify their personal choices. 
>
> We fought in Korea and the president stopped the fighting and did not
> allow the fight to continue into the north. Where would Koreans
> prefer to live, in South Korea or North Korea?
> Americans do not fight to gain territory or to takeover countries. We
> fight to try to give others the chance to have liberty. We may differ
> on when it is our fight.
> If a cancer invades, it is something that is either fought or it
> kills. Islamism and Communism are the cancers. 
>
> So we may differ on whether something is our fight or not, or in how
> the fight is fought, but, please, let us at least agree that America
> represents  the goodies and not the cancer.
> Janet Cantor
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: "Beck, David A" <dabeck at iupui.edu>
> To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
> Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2014 8:50 AM
> Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
>
>
> Janet,
> I'm not sure we are a "shining light to the world" anymore or have been
> for a long time. Our credibility has been on a downhill slide since
> Viet Nam. I'm more apt to remember Percy's analogy of the old, rusting,
> roller coaster at the beginning of Love in the Ruins: "now [is]the
> blessing [on the U.S.A.] or the luck is over, the
> machinery clanks, the
> chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?" (I love that passage.)
>
> -David
>
>
>
> Quoting janetcantor37--- via Percy-L <percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>:
>
>> How lovely to read this now. But how sad because I am beginning to
>> think that this is becoming obsolete thinking these days. There is
>> more race rancor in our conversation today than I can remember since
>> the 60's. It shouldn't be this way. I wish it were not so. We have a
>> great country. I hope we don't lose it because we are asleep at the
>> switch. It is a country worth saving, a shining light to the world. I
>> wonder what Percy would be saying about current attitudes?
>> Janet Cantor
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Jim Forest <jhforest at gmail.com>
>> To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
>> <percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2014 6:04 AM
>> Subject: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
>>
>>
>>
>> from the March 29, 1957 issue of Commonweal
>>  
>> https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/american-war
>>  
>> The American War
>>  
>> by Walker Percy
>>  
>> WHAT ARE THE reasons for the current revival of interest in
>> the Civil War? That there is such a revival is undeniable. Books on the War
>> pour off the presses every week?some of them, incidentally, of a very high
>> order, such as Bruce Catton's This Hallowed Ground
> and Shelby Foote's Shiloh!
>> What is at once noticeable about the current literature is its frankly
>> non-political character and the absence of the old rancor. The race
>> issue may
>> be still very much an issue, but Northern and Southern historians
>> have achieved
>> a common view of the War itself. When Catton from Michigan and Foote from
>> Mississippi write about the battle of Shiloh, it sounds like the
>> same battle.
>> Catton is never more eloquent than when he is appraising Lee's generalship;
>> Foote is just as impressed by the fighting qualities of the Northern
>> soldier.
>> Indeed, from this distance the underdog psychology probably kindles
>> the reader's
>> enthusiasm more readily than do the social issues?and perhaps this
>> is just as
>> well.
>>  
>> The general impression outside the South seems to be that it
>> is the rest of the country which has rediscovered
> the Civil War, that
>> the South
>> has never stopped looking back. This is mistaken, I believe, and is
>> due to an
>> understandable optical illusion. The truth is, at least in my
>> experience, that
>> the Southerner never thinks about the Civil War?until he finds himself among
>> Northerners. Then, for some reason-perhaps because the Northerner insists on
>> casting him in his historical role and the Southerner is perfectly
>> willing to
>> oblige, or because, lost in the great cities of the North, he feels for the
>> first time the need of his heritage?he breaks out the Stars and Bars. I
>> remember traveling from Alabama to summer camp in Wisconsin in the twenties.
>> The train would stop in Chicago to pick up more boys. We from Alabama
>> had heard
>> as little about the Civil War as the Boer War and cared less, but every time
>> the Illinois boys got on in Chicago the War started, a
> real brawl yet not
>> really bad-tempered. The same sort of thing must have happened during
>> the World
>> War I when an Alabama division suddenly found itself in a donnybrook
>> with the
>> Fighting 69th at Plattsburg.
>>  
>> The truth of it is, I think, that the whole country, South
>> included, is just beginning to see the Civil War whole and entire for
>> the first
>> time. The thing was too big and too bloody, too full of suffering
>> and hatred,
>> too closely knit into the fabric of our meaning as a people, to be
>> held off and
>> looked at-until now. It is like a man walking away from a mountain.
>> The bigger
>> it is, the farther he's got to go before he can see it. Then one day
>> he looks
>> back and there it is, this colossal thing lying across his past.
>>  
>> A history of the shifting attitudes toward the War would be
>> enlightening. There
> would probably emerge a pattern common to such great
>> events, a dialectic of loss-recovery: the long period of
>> recollection, of in­
>> tense partisan interest which is followed by a gradual fading of the
>> Event into
>> a dusty tapestry. (Lee and Grant at Appomattox taking their place beside
>> Washington Crossing the Delaware.) Then under certain circumstances,
>> there is
>> the recovery. Perhaps Washington will never be recovered, having been
>> ossified
>> too long in grammar school tableaus. But Lincoln and Grant and McClellan and
>> even the legendary Lee, who after all are closer in time to
>> Washington than to
>> us, have come very much alive. Why, then, their recovery, and what
>> exactly has
>> been recovered?
>>  
>> WHAT HAS been recovered, it seems clear, is not the politics
>> or the sociology of the War, nor even the slavery issue, but the
>> fight
> itself.
>> The tableau I remember from school was the Reconciliation, Grant and
>> Lee in the
>> McLean house, Lee healing the wounds at Washington College. Little was said
>> about the War, except that it was tragic; brother fighting against brother,
>> etc. Undoubtedly this was the necessary if somewhat boring emphasis for the
>> textbooks. Now, after ninety years of Reconciliation, we can take a
>> look at the
>> fight itself.
>>  
>> What a fight it was! The South is a very big place, yet
>> there is hardly a district that didn't have its skirmish, its
>> Federal gunboat
>> sunk in a bayou?where some old-timer won't tell you, "Yes, they came
>> through here." It is startling to realize that there were more casualties
>> in the Civil War than in all the American forces of World War II, and
>> more than
>> in all other American wars put together. Of 3,000,000 men under
> arms,
>> 2,300,000
>> for the Union, 750,000 for the Con­ federacy, 618,222 died, with total
>> casualties probably going well past a million. For sheer concentrated fury,
>> there are few events even in modern warfare to equal that terrible
>> September 17
>> at Antietam Creek when over 20,000 men fell?or the May-June of '64
>> when, beginning
>> with the battle of the Wilderness, Grant lost on the average of 2,000
>> men a day
>> for 30 days, culminating in the slaughter at Cold Harbor when over 8,000 men
>> fell in about ten minutes! There were murderous battles in the West
>> which one
>> never heard of, like Stone's River with over 25,000 casualties.
>>  
>> Yet terrible as it was, it is impossible to read of the Army
>> of Northern Virginia or of the Army of the Potomac without being
>> caught up in
>> the tremendous drama. The armies were big enough so that the
> action
>> took place
>> on an epic scale, yet the War was, as much as were the Punic Wars, a
>> personal
>> encounter of the opposing leaders. Lee was very much aware of this
>> grim beauty
>> when the fog rose over Fredericksburg showing Burnside's entire army facing
>> his, battle flags flying.  "It is
>> well that war is so terrible,? he said; "else we should grow too fond of
>> it." But what gave the Civil War the tragic proportions of the Iliad 
>> was the  fact, apparent after Shiloh, that the American soldier,
>> Union and
>> Confederate, was not going to be beaten until he could literally fight no
>> longer or was killed. When his leader was great, he was almost
>> invincible; when
>> his leader was mediocre, he was still superb. Pickett's charge is justly
>> famous, but just as heartbreaking was the Union  assault on
>> Longstreet's position in the
> sunken road at Fredericksburg.
>> The difference was that where Pickett?s men had every confidence in Lee,
>> Couch's men knew very well that Burnside was wrong. Yet they
>> attacked all day
>> long, and only stopped when the field was piled so high with dead that they
>> could no longer run over them.
>>  
>> AS IN ALL tragedies, a great deal seemed to de­ pend upon
>> fate. Small mischances become as important as Thetis?s oversight when she
>> dipped Achilles?all but his heel?into the Styx.  A Con­federate
>> courier  loses some
>> battle orders;  they  are found wrapped  around  three cigars and
>> brought to McClellan; the direct result is the battle
>> of Antietam. One can't read of that war without playing the
>> fascinating game of
>> what-if.... What if Jackson had lived through Chancellorsville? What if
>> McClellan had listened to Phil
> Kearny (instead of the Pinkerton detectives)
>> during the Seven Days? What if Jeb Stuart had tended to business at
>> Gettysburg?
>> Lee was always just missing his Cannae and Lincoln's generals were
>> always just
>> short of ordinary competence?until he got Grant.
>>  
>> Besides the great failures, there were the great successes,
>> the heroes' deeds which are always irresistible to the human spirit
>> and so pass
>> over immediately into the legend of the race. There was
>> Chancellorsville when
>> Lee, facing Hooker's 85,000, divided his battered army of 43,000,
>> sent Jackson
>> to the left, leaving him in front of Hooker with 17,000 men?and attacked and
>> very nearly destroyed the Army of the Potomac. There was the Union's
>> "Pap" Thomas's assault on Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga and the
>> subsequent demoralization of Bragg. And there was the fateful decision
> at
>> Spotsylvania when, after taking a fearful mauling, Grant, instead of falling
>> back toward Washington as the army had been doing for the past three years,
>> re­treated south, sliding around Lee's right.
>>  
>> Therein lies the tragedy. If Lee had been a little more or a
>> little less?if he had gotten his Cannae or if he had only been just
>> competent
>> and been whipped by McClellan in '62?the results would still have
>> been notable,
>> but they would not have approached the terror and  piteousness of
>> what actually did happen. The
>> summer of 1864 has a Gotterdammerung quality. With the issue hardly in doubt
>> after Gettysburg, the fighting nevertheless increased in fury with
>> both sides
>> attacking steadily, without the usual remissions between battles.
>>  
>> YET WITH all the horror, or perhaps because of it, there was
>> always the feeling
> then, and even now as we read about it, that the things a
>> man lived through were somehow twice as real, twice as memorable as
>> the peace
>> that followed. Peace is better than war, yet it is a sad fact that
>> some of the
>> heroes of the War, like Grant and Longstreet and many a lesser man,
>> found the
>> peace a long descent into mediocrity.  In
>> the ordeal the man himself seemed to become more truly himself,
>> revealing his
>> character or the lack of it, than at any time before or after. If a man was
>> secretly cowardly or secretly brave, stupid or shrewd, that was what he was
>> shown to be. The War infallibly discovered his hidden weakness and
>> his hidden
>> strength. Hooker the braggart was reduced to impotence simply by
>> having Lee's
>> small army in front of him (and understandably, for the veterans of
>> the Army of
>> the Potomac used to say to replacements fresh from
> victories in the West:
>> "Wait till you meet Bobby Lee"). Grant the ne'er-do-well matured in
>> defeat and became a noble and sensitive human being by having Lee at
>> his mercy.
>> It is no wonder that there was the temptation, especially in the
>> ruined South,
>> to enshrine those four years as the four years of truth and to discount all
>> other times, even the future.
>>  
>> Then there were the thousand and one lesser en­counters, any
>> one of which, if it had happened at another time, would have its own
>> literature
>> and its own historians: the Confederate raiders, Farragut's capture of New
>> Orleans, the battle of the ironclads, Forrest's miniature Cannae at Bryce
>> Crossroads, James Andrews' stealing  the
>> Confederate train, and so on. It was the last of the wars of
>> individuals, when
>> a single man's ingenuity and pluck not only counted
> for some­ thing in itself
>> but could conceivably a:ffect the entire issue. Forrest himself is quite
>> unbelievable. It is as if Launcelot had been reborn in Memphis. He
>> carried into
>> battle a cavalry saber sharpened to a razor edge and actually killed
>> men with
>> it. He actually did fool a Yankee commander into surrendering by parading a
>> single cannon back and forth in the distance as they parleyed. He
>> actually did
>> have twenty-nine horses shot from under him.
>>  
>> THERE IS an ambiguity about this new interest in the Civil
>> War. On the one hand it is the past recaptured, the authentic
>> recovery of the
>> long agony during which this nation came to be what it is. Yet there is also
>> the temptation to yield to an historical illusion by which the past seems to
>> gain in stature and authenticity as it recedes and the present to be
>> discounted
>>
> because it is the here and now. We sense the illusion in the words of the
>> old-timer, "Yes, they came through here," in which it is somehow
>> implied that this place has existed in a long trivial aftermath
>> after its one
>> day of glory. Perhaps the North is in for a mild case of the same
>> romanticism
>> which the South recovered from over fifty years ago.
>>  
>> The increased emphasis upon the fighting at the expense of
>> ideology is probably good. One does well, anyway, not to apply ideology too
>> closely to that war. James Truslow Adams can talk about the March of
>> Democracy
>> and Bruce Catton can call the Union army a truly revolutionary army
>> and perhaps
>> they are right. Perhaps the War was really and truly fought over
>> slavery. But the
>> other case can be made too. It is difficult to see the yeoman farmers who
>> largely made up the Army of the Tennessee
> and the Army of Northern
>> Virginia as
>> Southern Bourbons. The South had some reason to regard the fight as a
>> continuation of the American Revolution. After all it was her soil which was
>> being invaded and her independence which was being denied. The South
>> might even
>> have the better of the constitutional argument; yet what won out seems to
>> transcend all the arguments. For it is that extraordinary thing, the
>> American
>> Union.
>>  
>> * * *
>> Jim & Nancy Forest
>>
>> Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands 
>>
>> Jim's books: www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/
>>
>> Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com
>>
>> Photo albums: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/
>> Photo collections:
> www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/
>> On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/
>> A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/
>> In Communion site: www.incommunion.org
>> Forest-Flier Editorial Services: http://forestflier.com/
>>
>> * * *
>> --
>> An archive of all list discussion is available at
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/
>>
>> Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>>
>> Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add
>> @ sign when
> addressing email)
>
>
>
> --
> An archive of all list discussion is available at
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/
>
> Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>
> Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add
> @ sign when addressing email)





More information about the Percy-L mailing list