Hope's Imperfection

Chapter 18: The War

By the following evening, Civil War mementos were scattered across the floor of Grandma Stanhope's house. The collection contained various and sundry pieces, from Confederate script to spare parts for a carbine rifle! There were medals and military honors from various soldiers, including Rupert Stanhope who perished on the final day of fighting at the battle of Gettysburg on July 3rd, 1863. He was part of the 11th Pennsylvania regiment, having made his home with his wife Julie in York, Pennsylvania, soon after having left California. The couple had had two young sons, Ian and Adam, twins.

The American Civil War is mythologized to the point of farce. Civil War chess sets and distasteful re-enactments pepper the culture until the true meaning is washed away. Thomas Jefferson believed that the American continent would one day be home to two nations, an east and a west. Perhaps he did not predict the geography correctly but he was spot on that the land which contains the present-day United States of America would be fractured and fought over. He would have seen the geography as too vast and too regional to be held in place by just one government. Indeed the economic systems of the north and south had become so different. The south depended on slave labor and the rich plantation owners controlled the economic destiny of the southern states through the production of cotton. In a way the Confederate states were ahead of their time. By 1860, eighty percent of the population of the U.S. lived on family farms, but in the southern states plantation owners turned farming into a corporate process to create wealth, exporting two-thirds of the planet's cotton overseas to Europe as well as quantities of tobacco and sugar cane.

I certainly understand how the Union and Confederate states grew apart and how the moral issue of slavery became convenient kindling for the tempest that was to begin. Slavery was not truly the issue. In fact, Lincoln allowed Border States such as Maryland and Delaware to continue to impose slave systems well into his term as President. And if slavery were the issue, why did multitudes of southern subsistence farmers give up their lives when none of them actually kept slaves? Slavery was the economic system of the wealthy plantation owners; it wasn't intended for or used by the common man. How do you convince thousands of men to fight for the economic property of a handful of rich plantation owners? You make them afraid. You convince them that their way of life is threatened and their families are not safe. I suppose it is the same political trickery that is used every four years in the election process by some political group to gain power. Unfortunately, at some point fear trumps logic and in the end the population of the United States was decreased by three percent as a result. In present-day terms, if a similar cull took place, seven million Americans would lose their lives in the course of a four-year span and in fact one in four able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty would be slaughtered. The immensity is stunning.

I learned from my father's clippings that the war itself did not begin with the kind of dramatic event that foreshadowed the carnage that would follow. The official first shot happened in April of 1861 when the confederates lobbed a few ceremonial volleys at an inconsequential and antiquated military compound in South Carolina. No one was killed. Abraham Lincoln condemned the act and responded by conscripting a few young men for a ninety-day period which would generously cover the expected period of unpleasantries. My father once told me that the most dangerous military conflicts occur when one side underestimates the other. The Civil War was a classic case of the leadership's inability to postulate the end game. As the two armies became entrenched, a tipping point was reached that ensured no side could back down. It is as obvious and sublime as it is tragic.

Between 1861 and 1863 the confederacy was making headway. They formed a temporary capital in Montgomery, Alabama, and then worked on a permanent home in Richmond, Virginia. Their armies were winning the majority of the skirmishes, and morale was high. However, another phrase that my father used often was about to ring true, "Pride comes before the fall". So in the middle of 1863, with a mass of Confederate boys marching around the countryside and getting perilously close to the District of Columbia, an opportunity presented itself to wipe out a good proportion of the Union army that was camping out in the pasture lands around the town of Gettysburg.

I had been to Gettysburg before on school trips. Unlike most fights that are planned and staged for months, this was a happenstance, an intersection of opportunity and pride that was too interesting a cocktail to resist. The two groups took to battering each other over the course of a long weekend. In the end the Union soldiers could not be knocked off their position on the high ground, and copious numbers of Confederate soldiers lost their lives on the final day of battle when the esteemed General Lee foolishly asked them to charge up an open countryside to their deaths.

In amongst the piles my father kept is a photograph of a grave with the name of Union soldier Rupert Stanhope etched on a stone and resting in the National Cemetery at Gettysburg.

While I was madly piecing together the life and times of Rupert, back in Milwaukee I had Sarah do some digging into the preeminent Todd Fraser, Lucy's husband and Richard's son-in-law, from Georgia. When we reconvened on line later that night I filled Sarah in on the missing pieces of Rupert's life, while she had uncovered the fine details of Todd's political life.

Todd was very much in on Georgia's secession from the Union and remained a staunch advocate for slavery and states' rights for the rest of his life. He was critical of the Confederate government which he belonged to, including the leadership provided by its President, Jefferson Davis. Immediately after the war he was imprisoned by the new government in Georgia, was later released, and in the true full circle of politics was re-elected to the Georgia legislature just before his death in 1885. Likely his wife, the lovely Alicia, remained estranged from her father for the rest of her life.

In the final analysis, and in a strange way, Lincoln got what he wanted: not an end to slavery but a nation unified by a growing central government. Of course, he never got a chance to enjoy it or comment on the consequences of victory as we all know he was slain only a few days after the south surrendered. In our house, Lincoln's legacy was always more balanced. If you believe the public, monumental version of history, Lincoln gave the country its freedom by freeing it from slavery - but at what cost? About 650,000 men lay dead around the countryside! Forget the tragedy or the symbolism, how does a nation in the middle of the nineteenth century physically and emotionally deal with the bodies and the suffering of the survivors? To do so, the country needed to create a vast system of social structures to deal with the epidemic it had created. Federal hospitals, new transportation systems, regulated processes for the disposal of bodies, charities to aid the newly disenfranchised, social programs, and the expansion of public schools for the poor were all created by a now burgeoning national government. Before the war most of the country was made up of rural poor. Now the gap widened and continues to widen today. The poor were now the enemy. White rule returned to the south and, without an economic system in place, whites turned to violence to re-establish their control. The Ku Klux Klan was born. Labor unions sprang up to protect the rights of the new industrial workers building railroads in the north, but they offered no protections for women or blacks.

Maybe the war, or at least a similarly deadly clash of values, was inevitable, but I like to think it could have been avoided. Instead it led to a unified but bitter nation that took its revenge on the most disenfranchised of groups, the American Negro. Today Race punctuates every dialogue in the country; every issue is black or white; even if originally the debate doesn't have anything to do with race at all, it doesn't matter, every problem is framed with a racial lens. Black Americans have been becoming increasingly and justifiably militant in recent years and White American's prefer to simply ignore racially charged social issues while quietly perpetuating social stereotypes that ensure the pace of social change is glacial. The American experience has become two solitudes.

From my father's memoirs I came to understand how the Civil War and its aftermath shaped the future of the country. It is said that in every southern boy there is a place held deep within that harkens back to July 1, 1863, just before the battle of Gettysburg, the day before the nation changed forever. But it also made me think about death: the deaths of my father, Rupert Stanhope, and Richard Stanhope's mother and father, all left unable to fulfill the promise they had worked so hard to create. And then there was the haunting phrase written by Rupert Stanhope on the eve of his death, about a man doing his duty in the time that he had left in his life. It was no doubt the same code that my father lived by.

In one of the final entries in my father's collection was another photo that he took when he visited Gettysburg, of Rupert's grave site. Whereas all of the soldiers' markers were in a row, Rupert's grave was slightly off to the side, on its own mound, seemingly overlooking the Pennsylvania pastureland. To me, it was a clear indication of one assured fact: Richard Stanhope has been there. I would need to go back.