Peter Wehner provides historical perspective for those despairing over our involvement in Iraq. It's an excellent essay and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Here's the history lesson:
In the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Herbert Donald:
"Many Northerners were euphoric at the outbreak of war, confident that the Union with its vast natural resources, its enormous superiority in manufactures, its 300 percent advantage in railroad mileage was bound to prevail. Surely its 20,000,000 inhabitants could easily defeat the 5,000,000 in the Confederacy. Seward thought the war would be over in ninety days. The Chicago Tribune anticipated success 'within two or three months at the furthest,' because 'Illinois can whip the South by herself.' The New York Times predicted victory in thirty days, and the New York Tribune assured its readers 'that Jeff. Davis & Co. will be swinging from the battlements at Washington... by the 4th of July [1861].'"
Then came the First Battle of Bull Run, which shook the confidence of both Lincoln and the Union; and the Second Battle of Bull Run, which threw Lincoln and the Union into a state of near despair. "Alone in his office," the Lincoln biographer Stephen Oates has written, "Lincoln mulled over his oceans of trouble, mulled over the vast uncertainties of this war, and confessed that events had spun out of his control."
"The people are impatient," Lincoln wrote. "[Secretary of the Treasury Salmon] Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?" Lincoln asked in 1862.
After that came the carnage of Antietam; setbacks in the 1862 midterm elections; and the loss at Fredericksburg. "Disgust with the present government is certainly universal," one man observed. "Even Lincoln himself has gone down at last. Nobody believes in him anymore."
"We are now on the brink of destruction," Lincoln himself said. "It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope."
By early July 1864, Professor Donald writes, "a visitor found Lincoln deeply depressed. War weariness was spreading, and demands for negotiations to end the killing were becoming strident." Calls for General Grant's resignation (McClellan had long since been replaced) were common - and so were discussions of replacing Lincoln on the Republican presidential ticket. "From all corners of the Union came waves of indignation against Lincoln," according to Oates, "that he could sanction such senseless carnage, that he could put a butcher like Grant in command."
High casualties among Union soldiers, Grant's impasse at Petersburg, and weakening resolve in the North led Lincoln to issue a blind memorandum to his Cabinet members on August 23, 1864, saying that "it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected." If that had happened, Lincoln would today rank among our least successful presidents.
But then General Sherman gave President Lincoln all that he needed. "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won," Sherman wired Lincoln in the aftermath of Sherman's occupation of Atlanta. Lincoln went on to win re-election on November 8, and a week later General Sherman began his march to the sea. After that came the capture of Petersburg and the occupation of Richmond. General Lee finally surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. The Civil War was over, the slaves were freed, the union was preserved - and more than 620,000 lives had been lost in a nation of 31 million. A war of equal magnitude today would kill roughly six million Americans.
Was the Civil War worth the effort, worth the cost, worth the carnage? For most people today, the question is essentially rhetorical; after all, the president whose tenure was consumed by the war has his face chiseled in granite on Mt. Rushmore. But if you had asked Americans in the North (let alone in the South) the same question in 1862, or 1863, or 1864 - or even asked them that question in the aftermath of the surrender of the Confederacy, when reconstruction was going poorly and the wounds of the Civil War were still deep and fresh - many people would have said the war was senseless, the slaughter unbearable, and the conflict should be stopped, come what may.
Yet Lincoln, who made significant errors in the war, always understood the stakes of the struggle. He made adjustments along the way even as he refused to bend on the moral meaning of the Declaration and the need to preserve the Union. Eventually the war was redeemed and America was made whole.
"Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history," according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton, "a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned."
We do well to keep this history in mind and to meditate upon its lessons.
RLC
