“This Was All We Knew”: A Remembrance of the Eisenhower Years
By Jack Chatfield, Associate Professor of History
(An earlier version of this essay was delivered at an assembly of the incoming Trinity first-year class in September of 2006.)
There could be no higher compliment than the one we have paid to you, the Class of 2010, by inviting you to begin your Trinity career by reading and discussing together an enduring and quite controversial work of fiction—the kind of imaginative work that Lionel Trilling described as “the highest form of moral statement.” Indeed, we can only imagine how the administration of a college such as Trinity might have responded if a professor had recommended the novel as freshman reading in 1955, when the book appeared. The story of Alden Pyle was not an edifying one. A prudent administrator might have suggested shelving The Quiet American till calmer times prevailed.
To be sure, by 1955, “The McCarthy Era”—the period of bare-knuckled, eye-gouging, inquisitorial anti-communism symbolized by the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin—was waning, in good part a casualty of the senator’s heedless and anarchic ways, and the Reign of the Debased Democratic Passions was apparently drawing to a close. It was none too soon. For while the Passions held sway, Senator McCarthy and his vociferous allies assailed senior cabinet secretaries as Communist conspirators; Congressional committees used subpoena powers to browbeat “subversives” not as lawbreakers but as heretics; and federal authorities revoked the passports of American Communists or “disloyal” radicals guilty only of harboring dangerous thoughts, while barring the entrance of non-citizens for fleeting and remote associations, or simply for criticizing the mighty United States. Hollywood’s Lucille Ball was haled before the House Un-American Activities Committee to explain that she had joined the Communist Party in 1936 “to please [her] grandfather.” The British comedian Charlie Chaplin, reputed to be a “Communist sympathizer,” was expelled from the United States not because of unlawful conduct but because (as the attorney general explained) he had made “leering, sneering statements about the country whose gracious hospitality has enriched him.” Even Graham Greene—who had spent a month in the Oxford Communist Club in 1923 before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1926—was denied a visa in the late 1940’s. Eminent figures such as Paul Robeson, the son of a fugitive slave who had breached the color barrier to become one of the most brilliant and versatile actors and singers of the century, found themselves stripped of their personhood and their nationality. Robeson’s passport, held since 1922, was revoked in 1950, evidently because he was a blindly loyal Stalinist but also—as a federal official said— because of “the appellant’s frank admission” that he had advocated “the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.” If Ann Coulter were here—and I see she is not—she might remind us that some Communists had become espionage agents. So they had. But surely at this supreme moment of trial, “the world’s greatest democracy” ought not to have shrunk from the challenge of distinguishing espionage or subversion from varieties of political dissent, however delusional, despicable, or misguided. The Communism of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung was a monstrous evil, barely comprehensible to Americans immunized against the rise of psychopathic despots. But the malevolence of an enemy does not supply—still less does it enhance—the virtue of its most powerful adversary. When the indomitable Arthur Koestler, author of the anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon, warned Americans against battling “a total lie in the name of a half truth,” it was not clear who was listening.
I must acknowledge that I would have been ill-prepared to read The Quiet American when I entered Trinity College in the fall of 1960, months after the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-in, and at the height of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign. When Greene’s novel appeared, I was about to begin a four-year stint at a racially segregated, Methodist-supported, boys’ military boarding school in Front Royal, Virginia, about 60 miles west of Washington. It would have been hard to find a more commodious sanctuary than Randolph-Macon Academy, whose gold-domed, Georgian hall occupied the heights above the drowsy, faded town. Warren County, of which Front Royal was the seat, had closed its public schools to avoid a desegregation decree—one of two Virginia counties to embrace such a remedy. But this portentous act signified nothing to my befogged and insular mind. Randolph-Macon was a kind of idyll. How vividly I recall—as a novelist might recall—the texture of life—the starched shirts and “collar stays”; the white counterpanes neatly turned; the bugles sounding reveille or retreat; the buffed, echoing corridors; the lugubrious morning hymns; the nicotine clouds and comradeship of the “smoking area,” a handsome, stone structure set like a Roman fountain at the campus center; the bustling commandant with his fistful of keys and—not least—the persistent, throbbing, metronomic beat, and the voices of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard pouring out of the I-pod of our day, the 45-RPM turntable eternally whirring. Not that I appreciated rock ‘n roll as a musical style, nor the culture from which it sprung. As a priggish, self-proclaimed devotee of “jazz”—which I defined as the music of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman—I mocked rock ‘n roll as a degenerate form. This was ironic, since the lyrics of these songs—already the objects of frenzied attacks by clergymen, politicians, and displaced crooners—went right over my head. When Fats Domino sang, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” I imagined a berry-picking expedition. And when Little Richard cried, “I got a gal, her name is Sue/ She knows just what to do,” I thought he was praising her sound breeding, her prim manners, and her sense of propriety. You can see that I was not quite ready for the opium dens and bordellos of Graham Greene’s Saigon. The House of Five Hundred Women I might have taken for a convention of the League of Women Voters.
Still less had I begun to ponder the dilemmas bred by the Cold War. Whether by accident or design, R-MA cadets were not encouraged to discuss “current events,” and the history offerings—introductory European and American—were spare in the extreme. It may seem unkind to recall that the most memorable of our numerous guest lecturers was a man who knew the exact weight of all the Presidents. William Howard Taft tipped the scales at 367 pounds, he informed the transfixed cadets, while the ring of “faculty officers”—perhaps assigned to the window seats to prevent attempted escapes—listened politely.
In any case, our minds were shaped—to the degree they were shaped at all—less by studies or formal lectures than by the very life—the chemistry, as one might say—of the organism of which we were a part. The cadet corps—composed mostly of boys from the upper south and the Ohio Valley—easily endured a regimen dominated by the light garment of academics, religious services, football, parade ground drills, room inspections, and student-taught courses on such subjects as the proper assembly of the trigger-housing mechanism of the M-1 rifle. The hazing system visited upon “rats,” as the first-year students were called—though occasionally punctuated by the administering of three or four sharp strokes with a straightened wire coat hanger upon hindquarters thinly draped—was dominated largely by the interminable spit-shining of upperclassmen’s shoes. When I was a “rat,” our tormentors included the Corridor Chiefs, Aubrey Ellis and Orvin Jones. With their threadbare trousers (only “rats” wore new ones), their tight smiles, their border accents, and their cool, laconic manner, they radiated in our adolescent world a kind of mastery or (as the Machiavellians called it) “prudence”: a practical knowledge of things, derived from experience and memory, which allows one to anticipate future events. I mean only that, in our eyes, they “knew the ropes.”
A modicum of prudence—or of historical knowledge—would have permitted me better to understand the almost exotic world into which I had been thrust. Our teachers were “captains” attired in uniforms which included the waste-length Eisenhower jackets of the day. They formed a colorful corps. Rumors circulated about our Bible instructor, Captain Marshall Hamer, a shy, nervous man with darting eyes and a soft, musical voice, who clapped his hands like a pistol shot to silence unruly students. During hymns, his voice soared and his eyes glistened as though he had been born anew. One day he confirmed the veracity of the swirling rumors we had heard. As a group of “rats” formed a semi-circle in his tiny, dimly lit apartment, Captain Hamer drew out a small but well-preserved photograph. In it he stood, in a relaxed, unmilitary pose, looking almost dreamily at the camera. He wore the fur-lined leather jacket and soft cap of the bomber squadrons. The fuselage and wing of an imposing aircraft was partly visible. The “rats” stood without speaking: the picture opened us to a world we could not enter. Captain Hamer had become larger than life, untouchable. It was 1956: somehow the war against the satanic Nazis had led to the present contest. Until the German surrender, Captain Hamer had flown the Flying Fortresses. But he was not a warrior. Unlike the Germans and the Russians, Americans were not warriors, neither aggrandizers nor aggressors. They fought, but like Captain Hamer they fought always to defend – to restore and replenish—and they longed to find a direction home. Compelled to subdue and occupy, America punished the guilty few (as at Nuremberg), then heaped rewards (as with the Marshall Plan) upon the former enemy people. Nothing was exacted and nothing was imposed: one planted democracy as one planted a nutritious crop—a field of wholesome grain. When my father returned from Europe in 1945, he brought with him a thick packet of photographs, which he wrapped in a rubber band and placed in a drawer. They showed numberless pale, skeletal corpses piled high: his unit had entered one of the Death Camps. The men who did this—the Nazis—represented an evil unchecked, and unintelligible to us all. But as prisoners of the Americans, men who had become beasts—“the worst of the worst”—found their basic rights restored by wise-cracking G.I.s from Brooklyn. The Yanks knew no other way. Now West Germany was a bustling democracy, a friend. Recently I had stared at the cover of a newsmagazine that showed young German soldiers parading, with sleek, space-age helmets and olive-drab uniforms made in the American style. It was a kind of miracle. Wizards of atomic physics, builders of the “arsenal of democracy” which deposited enough equipment to sink the British Isles, whose soldiers carried the principles of liberty in their rucksacks, Americans were on top: there was nothing the Americans could not do. The Russians—barbarous, sinister, and duplicitous—sought to thwart us. This was all we knew. At home in Bethesda in 1958, I accompanied friends to a class called “Problems of Democracy.” I was genuinely confused: like Alden Pyle, I knew only that democracy was the solution to all problems.
As we have already seen, driving 60 miles due west from Washington in those days brought one to a pocket of the South. The names of our Corridor Chiefs—Aubrey and Orvin—could have been drawn from the diaries of privates in General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.. The academy’s commandant of cadets was an eccentric, retired Army colonel resplendently named Robert Cabell Rives, a veteran of the First World War, whose face rippled with emotion as he led the corps in lusty renderings of “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” a favorite of the doughboys of 1918. Colonel Rives’s imitable demeanor and mannerisms provided enough comic fodder to last a lifetime. On the bulb of his burnished nose—standing like a thin but sturdy branch plunged into the soil by a passing hiker—there sat a hair—black, solitary and erect—and visible to all discerning eyes. When he spoke, often tugging on his jowl and intoning “gentle-men, gentle-men, gent-le-men,” the hair quivered or swayed while the enraptured students gaped.
But glee was not always the proper response to Colonel Rives’s words. In the fall of 1956, as though speaking to an audience of aggrieved citizens, he delivered at our morning assembly an oratorical blast against the despised Republicans—the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower—urging his auditors to unite with the Democrats to defend white southerners against the encroachments of what he called “a lower and darker race, gentle-men, a lower and darker race.” Months later, standing with the cadet corps at the Confederate monument at the Front Royal courthouse, his voice full of soaring, almost volcanic passion, he celebrated General Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862—a campaign punctuated by the May 23rd surprise attack on the Union outpost at Front Royal. I have often regretted that I do not recollect his words. It appears that Colonel Rives was summoning the ghosts of the Confederacy as allies in what Virginia Democratic Senator Harry Flood Byrd called a campaign of lawful “massive resistance” against public school desegregation. Whether these 20th-century Virginians—however shrewd and skilled—could match the exploits of Stonewall Jackson is another question. The Valley Campaign is still studied at West Point. Explaining how, with an army of 17,000 men, he had outmaneuvered three Federal armies with a combined strength of 33,000, won five successive battles against divided forces less numerous than his own, and delayed the movement of a Union corps from the Valley to the Peninsula east of Richmond, where General George McClellan was marshaling the Army of the Potomac for an attack on the Confederate capital—explaining these things, the laconic Jackson said: “[You must] mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy.” I learned much later that Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign was part of a grand and richly ironic story which I should have liked to discuss with Colonel Rives. For at the gates of Richmond in the summer of 1862, General McClellan’s Union army stalled. Distraught and vexed, President Lincoln—citing “military necessity”—penned first the Preliminary and then the final Emancipation Proclamation, the latter of which freed all slaves in Confederate-controlled states or regions. Lincoln was neither a dissembler nor a romantic: as he delivered this crushing blow against the “peculiar institution,” he did not claim humanitarian motives. “We must free the slaves,” he told his cabinet secretaries, “or be ourselves subdued.” And months later, speaking to the Congress, he reached one of his rhetorical heights. “The fiery trial through which we pass,” he said, “will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…We know how to save the Union…In GIVING freedom to the SLAVE, we ASSURE freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth….” These words I did not learn from Colonel Rives’s impassioned oratory.
You can see that, by 1956, just beyond the academy grounds, two wars were raging: the struggle over Southern white supremacy and caste segregation; and the Cold War, pitting America and her allies against the Communist giants and their “satellites.” One could almost believe that the placid, grandfatherly demeanor of President Eisenhower—perhaps aided by his unaffected speech (“Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith,” he once said, “—and I don’t care what it is.”)—might quiet the spirit of discord at home and abroad. But the pace of the racial struggle was quickening: the summer of 1955 brought yet another Deep South atrocity (the murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till), while in Montgomery, in December, on a belching, wheezing municipal bus, the sedate Rosa Parks uttered her inaudible and irreversible “NO.” In Washington, rival definitions of “constitutional liberty” divided the Congress, and Dixie Senators and Representatives signed a “Southern Manifesto” assailing the Brown decision as an act of judicial tyranny. Mississippi Senator James Eastland went further: the Supreme Court’s desegregation decree, he said, was “part and parcel of the Communist conspiracy to destroy our country.” Nearly 100 years after the Civil War, the Copernican revolution in American race relations was beginning to stir.
Were other “revolutions” stirring beyond our shores? Apparently they were. For many reasons—not least, the Communist victory in China, and the unexpected intervention of a million or more Chinese “volunteers” in Korea in late 1950—the sentiments of America’s Cold Warriors were hardening. The war itself had been a shock to the nation’s psyche. When the North Koreans invaded, America’s shrunken land army (fewer than 600,000 men) was stretched thin. The Pentagon quickly dispatched to Korea men drawn from “occupied Japan” who had strolled through Tokyo in boisterous groups as though they were sailors on shore leave in Norfolk or Newport News. Many had never fired their weapons, nor did they expect to. Hard fighting and an atomic threat issued by Eisenhower brought a truce in the summer of 1953. But American policymakers were wary: Korea had ended in stalemate, and the French seemed to be facing defeat in Indochina.
“We face an implacable enemy [seeking] world domination by whatever means at whatever cost,” said a presidential commission on intelligence-gathering and covert action in December of 1954. [“There] are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of conduct do not apply…[We] must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemy…by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective means than those used against us.” Though loyal citizens might differ about the definition of “sophisticated,” the Central Intelligence Agency certainly demonstrated its tactical skill when it helped overturn the governments of Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 1954. Indeed, when John Kennedy entered office in 1961, he inherited from his predecessor a CIA-trained band of Cuban exiles primed for an invasion of the island. When the invasion failed, some fuming operatives began to plot the assassination of Castro, perhaps employing a seductress or an exploding cigar. Here was a departure from republican prudence that might have left Arthur Koestler groping for words.
I was a first-year student at Trinity College when the Bay of Pigs disaster occurred in April, 1961. The tightly-woven fabric of my Randolph-Macon days was rapidly disintegrating. With the sit-ins and freedom rides came a new and unexpected phase in the civil rights struggle. The May 1961 Rides brought savage attacks against demonstrators first in Anniston and Birmingham, and then in Montgomery, where a Justice Department lawyer (John Siegenthaler) lay unconscious on the street for nearly an hour after receiving a crushing blow to the head. Once again, the simian brigadiers of the Lost Cause were hastening the arrival of the new dispensation. “Massive resistance” had been abandoned in Virginia, and the black demonstrators in the southern metropolises commanded the moral high ground. “The Negro students of the South,” said Trinity Tripod editor George Will, now an eminent conservative columnist, “are teaching us how to be citizens.” Like Emancipation, the movement promised to lift a burden from all shoulders. Kennedy’s Lincolnesque Cold War rhetoric—the world, he said, could not survive “half-slave and half-free”—was cruelly mocked by the Jim Crow south, and many white southerners were mortified by the crudities of their segregationist brethren. A large foreign and domestic audience was transfixed by the American melodrama. Sensing this, a black teen-ager in rural Leesburg, Georgia, told the startled registrar of voters that if woe befell the Lee County movement, “people will come here from all over the world.” Long delayed, the Second Reconstruction brought America closer to its Jeffersonian creed, and many white southern politicians secretly rejoiced as regional defenses crumbled. After the great battles were over, Lyndon Johnson—the grizzled, scheming, profane Machiavel of the West Texas school—was asked by James Farmer of CORE why he had decided to risk all by supporting the civil rights cause. It was simple, he told Farmer: only the triumph of the movement could make Johnson himself “FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST—GOD A’MIGHTY—FREE AT LAST.”
“Victory” in Vietnam was not as easy to achieve. A generation earlier, our mobilization for the European and Pacific wars had made America the master of all it surveyed. Now, as the Vietnam conflict intensified, it seemed that a guerrilla army and its North Vietnamese partner were holding the nation in thrall. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who in the Good War had gathered statistics on the bombing of enemy targets while Captain Hamer’s squadrons swarmed over Germany, came to harbor paralyzing doubts about the venture, and a colleague found him sobbing at his desk during a moment of unbearable strain. “There may be a limit,” he wrote President Johnson in a remarkable memo in the spring of 1967, “beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation intro submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could…produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness and in the world image of the United States—especially if the damage to North Vietnam is complete enough to be ‘successful.’” Then came 1968, the election of Richard Nixon, phased withdrawal, a jerry-built Peace Accord, Watergate, and the collapse of South Vietnam.
In 1975, the year of Saigon’s surrender, after an epoch of domestic strife so fierce that some compared it to the Civil War, I made my first trip back to R-MA. I drew a deep breath when I saw black and white walking together, chattering happily, or swatting one another with their soft fatigue caps. But after a circuit of the grounds, I could see that the proud, bustling academy was gone. The Homecoming crowd was small. At dinner with a pathetic remnant of the class of 1960, I learned that the school had lost so many students during the early 70’s that it nearly suffered collapse, and that—like the shrunken army in Vietnam—it had watched helplessly as its disciplinary system tottered and swayed in the whipping winds. Some cadets had brazenly dropped empty beer cans into the shrubs beneath their dormitory windows, while others were nabbed sniffing glue. As a crowning blow, “the weed” had penetrated the academy grounds.
Sitting beside the school’s accountant, I inquired about a number of former teachers, administrators, and friends. Colonel Rives had died in 1969, the year which saw the largest anti-war rallies of the decade, and the appearance of an article by a noted Harvard scholar entitled “Revolution in the United States?” I regret to say that I received this news in silence: how I long to know how this extraordinary man—the philosophical descendant of John Randolph and Nathaniel Macon, after whom the academy was named -- endured the decade of the 60’s, when “the center could not hold,” and “anarchy [was] loosed upon the world.”
I also learned at dinner that my old corridor chief, Orvin Jones, was one of three academy alumni to die in the lost war in Vietnam. He had perished in 1965, just as the first American combat units were dispatched to Vietnam. This was all I knew. Word of his death put my thoughts in motion: with his sergeant’s stripes, his cool manner, his playful smile, his threadbare trousers, he stood at his open door, while the everlasting sounds enveloped him as they enveloped us all: “That’ll Be the Day,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Corrina, Corrina,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Chantilly Lace.” The voices had a sorcerer’s power, and the beat was a pulsating heart that never stopped.
When all our young hearts were ticking, we lived the good life, and we knew it. Our life was structured, textured, and abundant in its boyish, sensual delights. As young Americans, we shared a set of unspoken assumptions that held us like a strong fabric woven to endure for the ages. The great republic we knew was placid, prosperous, invincible. With its military prowess, its Godlike atomic might, its know-how, its love of novelty, its optimism, its casual manners, its consumer-driven economy—with all this, our United States seemed a prodigy among nations. Like the fresh, defiant, irrepressible music that poured out of our tiny victrolas, the America we awoke to in the Eisenhower years was like a shiny, new commodity, neatly packaged and set to be dispatched through the postal systems of the world. After 1945, America alone seemed to hold the key. We had destroyed two Japanese cities by devices that (in Truman’s words) harnessed “the power of the sun.” But when the G.I.s rolled into Kyoto following the surrender, the smiling citizenry lined the avenue and waved thousands of American flags. In Tokyo, baseball revived, and brassy swing bands flourished—their horn sections sounding like the “big noise [that] came out of Winnetka.” After the Korean truce, we thought no more of war. Then came the unlikeliest enemy of all: reedy, baby-faced guerrillas from “tiny Vietnam.” Speaking to a university audience in the year that Orvin Jones died, President Lyndon Johnson explained why the United States had intervened in Southeast Asia. “Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam, and its freedom from attack,” he said. “We want nothing for ourselves.” So Woodrow Wilson had addressed the Germans in 1917; so the gnomes of culture had instructed us in the days of our youth. We want nothing for ourselves.
America’s failure to prevail in Vietnam led to bitter recriminations, endless debate, and a determination on the part of powerful politicians and military men to throw off the “Vietnam syndrome” and restore the unrivalled stature and might that the nation was said to have enjoyed during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. After the Persian Gulf War of 1991, there was a widespread conviction that the United States had finally demonstrated to itself and to the world that it possessed the prowess, the technology, and the will to win its wars—and to win them, it seemed, at virtually no cost to its soldiers or its citizens. Some paid homage—express or implied—to the Eisenhower era. As President Bush prepared for war after 9/11, he warned the enemy that America would use its military power “in a place and manner of our choosing”—language taken directly (though without attribution) from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s 1953 speech threatening “massive” nuclear “retaliation” against aggressor nations..
We have learned yet again that it is easier to claim military mastery than to achieve it. Today, in Iraq, a chastened and almost baffled America confronts one of the most daunting and complex challenges it has faced since the onset of the Second World War. No policy choice is palatable, and no one in Washington—neither Democrat nor Republican—has satisfactorily explained what we ought to do, how we ought to do it, and how Americans, Iraqis, and the bulk of humankind might benefit from our decision.
How did we arrive at this pass? I am no less puzzled than many others who have watched the Iraq conflict with growing alarm and bewilderment. Among those who bear responsibility for the miscues of the past four years are men and women once heralded as worldly wise and battle-tested. However that may be, it now seems clear that the coterie who brought us to Iraq—those who weighed the risks and benefits, and who calculated future prospects—harbored a naïve, curiously romantic, even adolescent understanding of the character and power of the United States, to say nothing of the stricken, traumatized, haunted, perhaps deranged mentalité of a foreign land. They portray themselves as “conservatives,” but we are entitled to doubt that preposterous claim. These policymakers apparently believed that if unobstructed by ravenous enemies, American ideals would be universally intelligible, universally craved, and universally applicable. Plainly put, these self-styled “conservatives” failed to recognize what the philosopher and historian Russell Kirk called “the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence,” and minimized what he described as mankind’s “natural proclivity toward violence and sin.”
Equally important, they viewed America as a nation apart—a political organism untarnished by the vices and sins of “Old Europe” and the mass of humankind. They ought to have consulted such conservative seers as Alexander Hamilton, who in Federalist VI urged his countrymen “to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue.” The war planners of the Bush administration were right to believe that the conflict would bring out the best of America. But unaccountably, these self-styled conservatives were blind to the possibility that the war would highlight our imperfections, our incompetence, and our ineradicable tendency toward corruption, venality, and sin. The war itself has blasted our extravagant hopes of transforming the Middle East. In Iraq we have encountered forces that call to mind the maneuvers of Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry”—forces that have “surprised,” “mystified, and even “misled” the custodians of our durable republic. So it is as we search for a direction home.
POSTSCRIPT: Virginia, May 1863 and September 2006
Since my first return to Randolph-Macon in 1975, the Academy has been reborn. Heavily enrolled, it is fully co-educational, multi-national, and multi-ethnic. The cadet corps is drawn from countries spanning the four corners of the globe. Many students know of the lives of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. But without Colonel Rives, they are not likely to know of Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, or his death by friendly fire at Chancellorsville in May of 1863. That battle was General Lee’s most brilliant triumph.
About the circumstances of Chancellorsville there is much to know. In Washington, the President received news of the battle’s outcome with despair. “My God! My God!” he cried, “what will the country say?” For the Union, Chancellorsville marked the low point of the war. Northern Democrats were attacking the Emancipation Proclamation in unsparing terms as the act of a “half-witted usurper…monstrous, impudent, and heinous…insulting to God and man, for it declares those ‘equal’ whom God created unequal.” “[You] are used as soldiers,” an Iowa newspaper told northern volunteers, “to emancipate slaves…Are you, as soldiers, bound by patriotism, duty or loyalty, to fight in such a cause?” Lincoln had told a delegation of black ministers that American slavery was “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” Yet in the North— even in Lincoln’s Illinois, whose legislators condemned the Proclamation as “wicked, inhuman and unholy”—countless citizens looked upon Emancipation as a crime against nature and nature’s God, a crime against “democracy,” the American way of life. “The last best hope of earth”—for so Lincoln characterized the Union—had long been one of mankind’s greatest oppressors. Now a monumental effort to end that oppression was dividing rather than uniting the “free states” of the North. Knowing this, General Lee exuded confidence about the prospect of a Confederate victory. “If we can baffle them in their various designs this year,” he wrote just before Chancellorsville, “next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the North.” Lincoln’s party would be destroyed by “the friends of peace…We have only therefore to resist manfully and our success [southern independence] will be certain.”
But even General Lee could not anticipate the future.
Nor, in a manner of speaking can we anticipate the past—not our nation’s, and least of all our own.
Who would have guessed that, after all these years, I would finally be prepared to make the acquaintance of Colonel Robert Cabell Rives?
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The Chancellorsville National Battlefield Park is located on the Orange Turnpike west of Fredericksburg, now a clogged and noisy thoroughfare dominated by shopping-malls, motels, and restaurant chains, in suburban Washington, just off Interstate Route 95. Since 9/11, this artery has been designated an important evacuation route which, in the event of an attack, will carry travelers on to Richmond, Petersburg, and points South.