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| Colonel Joshua
Lawrence Chamberlain Brady - Handy |
A good friend recently suggested I read Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (2003). In novel form
it tells the story of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg through the eyes of
the military officers on both sides. I am not that far into it, but this
passage jumped out at me in light of the intensity of reactions to refugees
fleeing the violence in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the region that seems to
be spreading. Calls to protect people who are most like us at the expense of
those who seem least like us are loud. This passage (p. 27) attributes
dramatically different attitudes to Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. I
do not post this specifically to vindicate the Union or vilify the Confederacy,
nor to suggest they were widespread in the North and absent in the South, but
only as a mirror by which we can examine our own times.
He had a
complicated brain and there were things going on back there from time to time
that he only dimly understood, so he relied on his instincts, but he was
learning all the time. The faith was simple: he believed in the dignity of man.
His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had
learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and
the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the
land where no man has to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free
of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and
become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the
man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would
spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun here. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean
earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the
curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were
forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had
come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he
was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles
and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there
was really no such thing as a foreigner;
there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a
new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for
mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.
