Are We Repeating History--160 Years Later?

By Don Varyu

August 28, 2024

Eactly one hundred and sixty years ago, as the heat of summer began its surrender to the shorter days of fall, Abraham Lincoln sat disconsolately in the White House. His four years in office brought him the deaths of two of his sons…and the loss of mental equilibrium for his wife. He had ample reason to mourn.

And yet, he saw his greatest loss still ahead of him. The final blow would be not personal, but monumental. His grand vision to press for equality…to help construct a more perfect union…was dead in its tracks. The Civil War was stymied, with troops hopelessly stalled in Virginia and outside Atlanta. His reelection bid would be decided that November, and leaders in his own party called for someone else to replace the already-nominated Lincoln on the Republican ticket. He restricted his thoughts to what small steps he might take in his remaining months before a stinging electoral defeat.

Some urged him to delay the election; after all, no democracy had ever conducted one in the middle of a civil war. He demurred: “We cannot have free government without elections. And if rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, they might fairly claim to have conquered and ruined us.”
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His torment was compounded because of his opponent, the Democratic nominee George McClellan. Lincoln knew him and understood he would immediately cave to the growing national demand for a negotiated settlement. That would mean either the establishment of a separate Confederate nation…or its incorporation into a disfigured union which would permanently lay to rest the ideal of equality.

Lincoln understood this because McClellan had been Lincoln’s first general of the Union army, reporting directly to the Commander in Chief. But McClellan proved to be a cowardly lion. Again and again he refused to attack, despite holding overwhelming advantages. In the early months of the war, he sat passively, and ignored an opportunity to seize the confederate capital of Richmond, which would have almost certainly ended the war before it ever really began.

Due to McLellan’s passivity, nearly 750,000 American soldiers—from both sides--never went home again. And among those who did, many arrived with a missing arm or leg.

In that late summer, this was the legacy Lincoln pondered: a futile and failed attempt to preserve a United States.
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The Confederacy had entered the war with raucous spirit and a blood-curdling “rebel yell.” Southerners won most of the early battles…while McClellan dithered. Their dream of a “second American revolution” seemed not only possible…but maybe even likely.

Northerners had once looked at the rebels as rich whiners and hopeless rubes, caught up in their own fever dreams.
But after four years, with no end to war in sight, the resolve of the Nrth had flagged.They cared not so much that the V=Confederacy be defeated--just make them go away. Good riddance.
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Then, stunningly, good news broke. The deeply entrenched city of Atlanta, the transportation hub of the deep south, fell to Union troops. Hope in the north exploded. Lincoln and Union troops pressed their advantage, laying waste to everything during their fabled “march to the sea." The brave, “chivalrous” leaders of the Confederacy not so much fought to the death as simply withered away. There was no ultimate battle that settled everything. The surrender was calm. The South’s fever dream  evaporated.
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Could it be that the shocking ascendency of Kamala Harris could be repeating the historic turnaround of those days of early fall in 1864? Well, we can’t begin to foresee telling events that may answer that question.

But the majority of America does seem aligned on wanting to put our political civil war behind us. Enough. Maybe the right idea is not to make America again what it never really was…but to make it something different...something better equipped to tackle challenges of climate, technology, and man’s eternal inhumanity to man.

It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat itself--but it does rhyme.

I don't knowf for sure, but I think I hear harmony in the air.
 
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