The Home Front:
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Abe Lincoln and The United Nations The 100th anniversary celebration of the War Between the States may do us some good, as it comes at a time when there is...
...He is basically right—though there is much more to be said about the matter than he has written in any exposition I have seen...
...If Lincoln was right about the American Government of his day, it is safe to guess that our world union of 1961 cannot endure permanently half Communist and half free...
...but both slavery and federation went deep into human nature and roused basic emotions...
...it is, by its very nature, world-wide...
...Millions of people were so angered that calm reason became impossible...
...We look on with only faint hope of success as our new Administration begins its efforts to approach them...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Abe Lincoln and The United Nations The 100th anniversary celebration of the War Between the States may do us some good, as it comes at a time when there is increasing animosity between North and South...
...I had two older brothers in the battle of Gettysburg...
...Bruce Catton, one of our most perceptive writers on these matters, thinks the whole great tragedy could have been avoided if leaders had utilized the advantages afforded them by a democratic government...
...Communism is not far off...
...It depends on force, on deception, on degradation...
...In 1861, both Northerners and Southerners felt they stood for principles which were so basic that they called on men to fight...
...But there is expressed even more clearly the conviction that reducing humans to the status of property is so evil, so wrong that it cannot be accepted as a feature of any civilized society...
...Congress and the courts were then and are now instruments for expansion of democratic realities...
...The word permanently contains an implication that the author of the Emancipation Proclamation was willing to give the institution of slavery a long rope, though he felt that in the end it would wear itself out...
...We now hear people asking, and not too humorously: "Who won the war anyway...
...So separate from the rest of the world are the great Communist nations that thus far we have found it impossible to carry on any sort of satisfactory negotiations with them...
...Perhaps the war could have been side-stepped if only men had been different from what they were...
...But within that union the lusty seeds of liberty and equality would go on growing age after age...
...It is true that the slaves were only partly emancipated and the Union was preserved only in its legal and constitutional aspects...
...One of them had his skull criss-crossed with welts raised by a Southern sword...
...The opposition to the 1954 Supreme Court decision has caused some people to wonder whether the great struggle really accomplished the purpose for which 600,000 Americans sacrificed their lives...
...Translating beautiful theories into the solid facts of life may seem a long and tedious process, but by winning the conflict, we had made it possible to provide legal and legislative equality on a countrywide scale...
...I was born 13 years after Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee had their Sunday morning meeting at the Appomatox Court House...
...This way of looking at the present world division sounds like common sense...
...Inevitably, in connection with this anniversary celebration, we think of the present world union, the United Nations, and the danger of cleavage to which it is exposed...
...He had no doubt about the necessity of fighting to preserve the Union and human freedom...
...The boys and girls learned all about the errors committed by Generals McClellan and Sherman, but they also were taught that the North had won, that the slaves had been freed and that black men and white would live together in peace and equality from that time on...
...We shall see, in the course of time, whether President Kennedy will be more successful with the Communists than President Lincoln was with the Confederates...
...Its ways are as different from ours as slavery was from freedom...
...Even if the war was only half won—and without regard for the moment to the number of deaths—it was worth winning...
...The 14th Amendment had been added to the Constitution and the whole matter of race relations had been neatly finished and tied up...
...It was before a party convention in 1858 that Lincoln made his classic declaration: "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free...
...In my childhood, the talk around the evening stove in winter, or before the country store in summer, was always about the war...
...I will be told, of course, that Communism is not a form of slavery, that it is merely another form of government, that it exists far off—in Russia or China— and so is none of our concern...
...The difficulty is that it rests upon a completely false supposition...
...When people are in this state of mind they cannot be expected to make wise decisions...
...It is this process that now creates the sullen postscript to the war which is reported from the South in our daily press and newscasts...
...And it is not just another form of government which may be trusted to go on year after year carrying on innocent competition with the older forms of society...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 6
