10 Feb The war took decades to brew until boil

HIST552 Civil War-Seminal Event in American History

Week 8 Forum

Upon being asked by Brig. Gen. E. P. Alexander on the eve of surrender whether it might not be better to take to the woods and carry on a guerrilla war, General Lee responded thoughtfully with a variety of reasons why that course of action would have a long-lasting detrimental impact on the nation as whole. “We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from,” he is purported to have said, concluding that “the only dignified course for me would be to go to General General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences of my acts” (Alexander, 604-605) Lee’s rationale was on a plane so far above Alexander’s thinking the he confessed he was ashamed to have made the suggestion. As we know, no Confederate force took the woods, but historian Russell F. Weigley contends that while one might easily see how Lee could have seen his surrender as the only dignified course for himself, “it remains less easy to explain why nearly all the other warriors of the Confederacy also abandoned so readily the alternative of the kind of war that has become the customary recourse of nationalist movements unwilling to die but unable to compete with their enemies in regular war . . . (Weigley, 455).

Admittedly, Alexander made this apocryphal observation in 1907, when the nation was well on the road to recovery from the psychological devastation of war, and such statements were commonly made as support for continued healing, but true or not, he raises a good point that Weigley carries a step further when he goes on to say that “it may be that Confederate nationalism died so abruptly and so completely because it was never a true nationalism, that the fatal split in the Confederate psyche prevented the national spirit from ever flowering fully enough to nourish a resolve that would have persevered in the contest after all the romance was gone” (Weigley, 456).

The war took decades to brew until boiling over with Lincoln’s election, but the abrupt end to such a seminal event in our nation’s history does seem somewhat odd. Please provide your own thoughts on the Confederate willingness to lay down arms, knowing that their way of life would be forever destroyed, and on the strength or lack of strength of true Confederate Nationalism. Consider what brought the South to the point of warfare, and consider what those reasons looked like by the spring of 1865. Was the war a seminal event, or was it actually the quiet transition from war to peace that was so seminal to our history?