For a variety of reasons [1], I have long read and written about the Civil War. As it happens, the current audiobook in my car is a revisionist history about the origins of the Civil War that basically blames the war, to simplify the point without doing too much violence to it, on the fact that abolitionists were mean to poor, defenseless Southern slaveowners. Suffice it to say, I look forward to reviewing this audiobook with the rare pleasure of a gentleman with a knife and fork eyeing a particularly delectable cut of meat to tear into. Be that as it may, I would like to discuss a matter that seems so obvious that it is seldom discussed openly when we look at historical conflicts or at the numerous conflicts that mar our own lives [2]: what are we trying to accomplish by the strategies we take to dealing with others with whom we are in a conflict. What do we really want, and are we going about it the right way?
In the antebellum United States of the early 19th century, it was obvious that slavery presented a major conflict, one with a strong sectional divide. Given that our contemporary political culture features a strong set of ongoing regional conflicts, and given that we are not blessed with the most skilled statesmen to guide the ship of state, clearly the Civil War is of potentially unpleasant contemporary relevance. What was it that various sides wanted? This is not as easy a question to answer as appears to be the case, because all sides wanted many things, and some of them they wanted more than others, as is often the case in our own lives. Different elites struggled for political control, some people wanted to be left alone to do their thing, and essential differences of worldview led to continual disagreements, to the point where peace of mind became elusive. Given the multiplicity of concerns, it is perhaps easiest to examine the problem if we look at the two extremes, radical abolitionists in the North and radical proslavery advocates in the South, as representing the upper and lower millstones that eventually crushed the sectional harmony of the United States and plunged it into warfare.
Let us not pretend that both sides were equally at fault, but it is important to note that there were a lot of similarities as well as obvious differences between the two extremes. Within the culture of the free states, antislavery radicals were a small minority of the population, and their calls to disobey the compact of union with slaveholders and the threats of secession for a morally purer republic were largely ineffective at driving the political discourse of their states. On the contrary, radical slaveowners were a key part of the power base of the slave states, and represented an important elite that had considerable power in national, state, and local politics. Like their radical northern rivals, they too periodically threatened secession, but in this case not for ethical purity but rather in order to protect their vulnerable and iniquitous social institutions. With accuracy, radical abolitionists can be accused of a distinct lack of charity towards those who owned slaves or had to wrestle with the ethical dilemmas of how one remains a Christian in one’s own mind while holding the sons and daughters of God to be mere chattel, without any rights that masters were required to respect. Most of us, myself included, would judge the rape and exploitation of those persons held in service to owners to be the worse sins, but it is important to recognize that the lack of charity on the part of radical abolitionists was a sin, and a sin with particularly important consequences.
It is unfortunate, for the sake of our country, that the slaveowning elite of the antebellum South was both extremely wicked and extremely prickly. Had they been less wicked it would have been less urgent to arrest the spread of the cancer of their iniquitous domination of politics and the moral corruption caused by their slaveowning, and had they been less prickly slavery could have been ended slowly and gradually and with a minimum of violence, a solution which would have been beneficial for all sides involved, even that of the slaves whose full political and civil rights would not be recognized for another century after receiving their freedom from slavery. Statesmen like Abraham Lincoln had a sense of charity towards both slaves and slaveowners, seeing all as human beings, but this only gave a sense of eloquent compassion to the catastrophe that was to come. There may have been no way for slaveowners to move gradually from their hard-line position towards one that acted with justice towards those whom they were oppressing or exploiting, but it is clear that the harsh denunciation and demonization that they were subject to–and are still subject to–was guaranteed to make this proud and prickly group of people entirely unwilling to concede any rightness in the position of their enemies.
Much depends on the goal we have in mind, and that is especially true when we are dealing with vexing matters of conflict in the political realm. For those who ascribe to a prudential morality, there is the recognition that there is more at stake than the ideal, but also how the real world is to be more closely brought into harmony with the ideal. For those who wish to have a morality that has practical benefit in our corrupt and wicked world, we need not only an intense sense of justice that leads us to act towards the loosening of chains and the elimination of oppression and tyranny, but also a sense of compassion and charity towards those who are caught up in the grip of evil and who have a serious need to preserve their own face, their own dignity. It is at least as easy to neglect a sense of empathy with fellow sinners as it is to sin against our conscience by ignoring injustice in the sake of domestic peace. Somehow we need to retain both a divine discontent against sin, wherever it may be found, and a recognition of the fact that God’s mercy to sinners like us also means we are to merciful to other sinners.
This is at the core of what went wrong in the crisis of the antebellum United States, and it is a lesson that we fail to learn at our own peril because none of us are immune to this particular problem ourselves. Neither extreme position was able or willing to examine their own folly and wickedness, and both justified ever more extreme violence and hatred towards the other in a dialectic of denunciation and hostility, until there was nothing to do but to settle the issue by force of arms, and then bind up the nation’s wounds however imperfectly after the shooting had mostly stopped without the hearts of the most wicked evildoers having been changed at all. It may have been impossible to reach the hearts of those whose wicked slave power brought such disaster upon our republic, but it was criminal not to even try to reach for their hearts at all. In the face of conflicts and prolonged hostility with others, it is of the utmost importance that we never forget that our enemies are often people not unlike ourselves, however disturbing we may find the resemblance when we look in the mirror in the dark nights of our souls, or when we like awake at night stricken by the horrors of our fevered imaginations as we reflect upon the doom that has come upon us all.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/book-review-why-the-south-lost-the-civil-war/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/brother-against-brother-a-civil-war-story/
[2] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/how-to-avoid-a-conflict-that-nobody-wants/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/a-forgotten-model-of-conflict-resolution/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/book-review-the-peace-maker/
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