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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
that it was disappearing in the Western world and that it would
eventually disappear in the South. When the war was over, he wrote to
Lee as follows:
Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battle of our
liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake
which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that
which was saved at Waterloo.
Now on the basis of his knowledge of history, which was probably
the most extensive of any man of his time, Acton expected two things
to happen after the Northern victory: first, something drastic would
be done to the Southern leaders and, second, the victorious North would
go on to take over Latin America. It
is
true that both Jefferson Davis
and Alexander Stephens suffered incarceration, humiliation, and pain,
as Mr. Wilson points out. But they were both finally set free. To Acton
this came as a refreshing difference; "... while European monarchs
suppressed revolution with atrocious cruelty, Jefferson Davis had been
released by the great Republic." When Maximilian, Napoleon's abandon–
ed puppet in Mexico, was executed in 1867 Acton prophesied:
Nothing henceforth remains that can permanently arrest the
United States in the annexation of Spanish America.
If
they have the
prudence to avoid European war, and wisdom to compose their own
dissensions, they may grasp the most glorious inheritance the earth
affords.
He did go on to say that this annexation would probably be done not
by rule or incorporation but rather by treaty, and there are no doubt
valid arguments to say that it was done anyway, eventually and eco–
nomically. Still this does not weaken the argument that what Lord Acton
expected-a strong power immediately taking over weaker neighbors–
did not happen. All of American history seems to show that the funda–
mental ethos, despite expeditions in the services of greed,
is
non-im–
perialistic in a sense that would have been incomprehensible to a
Roman bureaucrat and probably now is to a Russian bureaucrat. And
there has never been any mystique about an historic mission to subdue
the world, as there was in Rome and as there is in Russia. And to one
learned observer, anyway, of the Civil War, its course was not easily
predictable in the light of past imperialisms.
The internal argument of
Patriotic Gore
echoes the introduction in
places but in a much more subtle fashion. It's all very complicated and
I am oversimplifying, but it goes something like this: the lust to domin-
