AMERICA REVISITED
433
ate arose in the North from a variety of sources all of which tended to
mask themselves with a moral pretense: the Abolitionists with their
Calvinism; Lincoln with his historical mission to save the Union; the
money-grabbers and power seekers mouthing platitudes as they built
up the machine. Even the most well intentioned of these people were
somehow infected by what Mr. Wilson thinks is the great modern
intolerance, the idea that history is on your side. The result was two
disasters: the destruction of the South and the centralization of the
North: under a Washington bureaucracy during the War and a Wall
Street oligarchy shortly thereafter. Opposed to these power drives
were certain Southerners, notably Alexander Stephens, who fought
against "the Demon of Centralism, Absolutism," in the name and prin–
ciple of states rights. Stephens even opposed the centralization of the
Southern government, though it meant losing the war.
The dramatic climax of this argument comes in the description of
the meeting between Lincoln and Stephens at Fort Monroe in 1865,
at a conference arranged by intermediaries in order to see if a peace
could
be
worked out.
It
was not, but here at last was the confrontation
of "two opposite moral political poles." Lincoln was the man of destiny,
the self-appointed leader who "hunts as one of the pack." Stephens is
usually "at odds with the pack." To put it another way: Lincoln col–
laborates with history, while Stephens opposes it.
At this point too the book becomes a protest against all the
tendencies of modern culture:
This issue presses hard on our time. There are moments when
one may wonder today-as one's living becomes more and more
hampered by the exactions of centralized bureaucracies of both the
state and the federal authorities-whether it may not
be
true, as
Stephens says, that the cause of the South is the cause of us all.
From all this follows the dirge, which is a lament for the three
American traditions that were wiped out or permanently damaged either
by the War itself or by the consequences of the War: the old South,
(Stephens); Virginia (Lee); and New England Brahminism (Oliver
Wendell Holmes). I give this whole argument of the book only to
conclude by saying that the best single statement on the Civil War is
still Lincoln's, from his message to Congress on December 1, 1862:
"Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery
it could not continue."
But
Patriotic Gore
is not only a history and a lament, it is also
a moral tract.
If
the enemy is history itself, and those who collaborate
