The American Spectator

Special Report

It was 144 years ago this week.

Thirty-five miles from where I write, for three extraordinarily violent days beginning on July 1st and ending on July 3rd, the fate of America hung in the balance.

p>By July 4th, the small village of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was a horrific landscape of carnage. The words of author and educator Garry Wills in his classic Lincoln at Gettysburg leave little to the imagination: br> /p>

...thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas-distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat....Eight thousand human bodies were scattered over, or (barely) under, the ground. Suffocating teams of soldiers, Confederate prisoners, and dragooned civilians slid the bodies beneath a minimal covering, as fast as possible....It was work to be done hugger-mugger or not at all, fighting clustered bluebottle flies black on the earth, shoveling and retching by turns...the scene was repellent...the whole area of Gettysburg -- a town of only 2,500 inhabitants -- was fetid and steaming...

br> The total number of killed, wounded and missing is estimated by most historians to approach over 50,000.

It was one battle. And things were about to get worse.

A mere eight days after the last shots were heard at Gettysburg, draft riots erupted in New York City on July 11. Democratic Governor of New York Horatio Seymour had egged the rioters on, telling New Yorkers in a speech on the Fourth that sometimes it was justified for people to take action -- and the law -- into their own hands. Days later, they did. Mobs roamed the streets of New York, lynching any black they could find, killing an enrolling officer charged with enforcing the draft. Hatred for the Lincoln administration and particularly for the changed rationale for the war was palpable. Originally told by Lincoln that the war was to preserve the Union, the announcement that the war's objectives now included emancipation had infuriated many in New York, Democrats in particular. Federal soldiers were sent in, promptly killing 27 rioters with a blast of cannon. Only after hundreds of troops from Pennsylvania arrived did the anti-Lincoln riots end. The violence had gone on for six days.

In light of all the self-induced defeatism swirling about the war in Iraq -- the non-stop wailing about "mistakes" and the "I-told-you-so" finger shaking from responsible people who should know better, one has to wonder what, if anything, they know about American history?

Or perhaps the correct question in light of all of the hysteria in the face of an enemy quite seriously reminding the world of their ultimate intentions yet again, this time in London and Glasgow, is: Was the Civil War worth it? Was Lincoln's resolve for victory in the face of the massive slaughter at Gettysburg (and elsewhere) a good thing?

Was the scene described by Garry Wills above really necessary? In light of the insistence that we should abandon Iraqis to their fate and let our enemies build a base from which to attack more Glasgows and Londons (not to mention New Yorks and Washingtons) with ever more lethal weapons and refined accuracy, the defeatist rhetoric of today makes one wonder whether any war is really necessary. Wouldn't it have been better to simply accept the idea pushed by the defeatists of the 1860s that African-Americans were destined for slavery and that it was just too bloody and ghastly a proposition to do anything to unchain them? After all, a lot of Americans, as was amply demonstrated in the New York draft riots, had quite plainly turned against the war.

The other day Senator Barack Obama gave a speech in which he blithely paid a passing tribute to the abolition movement. He said not a word about the conduct of his own party during those days, and its determination to shut the Civil War down, to declare it a failure, to accuse another president of bait and switch tactics designed to get America into war.

topics:
Barack Obama, Television, Law, Iraq, NATO, Africa