If one were to believe the history books, the American Experience and Exceptionalism shone bright and clear from the effort and success to leave the British Empire to the rescue of Europe in WWI and WWII. Actual history shows that our exceptional export of ideas and character were not a rosy as the history books might paint.
There was a way that nations fought from the 1600s and into the 1700s that had been influenced by both Christianity as well as those who understood that war happened when politics failed, which meant that the people in general were caught in the middle of various power struggles in Europe. The American Revolution was fought mainly around large population centers usually having armies square up to each other in open fields and having at it. There were exceptions on both sides where military leaders like Banastre Tarleton and even some patriot militia would discard honorable warfare to achieve short-term military objectives, but in the end those tactics had their own “blowback”. The civilian sentiment played an important role in the way the effort for independence of each of the 13 states would play out before the British grew tired of the conflict and costs.
Even the War of 1812 was fought this way and the treaty signed a few years later involved both parties at the negotiation table just like what they did in Paris in 1783 after the American Revolutionary War. Once again, principles, honorable principles prevailed even when warfare was “in session”.
The War Against Southern Independence (called the American Civil War in US government history books) unveiled the inherit evil that is at the core of humans in a broken world. Driven by desperation, principles are cast aside in the effort to short-cut to a desired outcome.
The truth be known, the seven states that seceded actually took the high ground in formulating their reason for divorce with the federation. They knew that the US Constitution, the law of the land, was to be central in their rationale in desiring to exit, just like the 13 colonies did with England 80 years prior. Lawyer speak made these documents stress the way the slavery issue made the separation a necessity. The Constitution had allowed chattel slavery, and so the seven southern states made their case based on this “issue”.
In reality, the main issue was financial and economic in nature, but to prove that based on the Constitution would have been a tough fight. The southern region in general was the wealthiest in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was penned but by 1860 this region had seen their power be eclipsed by the North and the West (existing Midwest). Tariff revenue sources were a hot issue since the South bore the brunt of that expense. Additionally, this revenue funded not only the general government but also internal improvements, mainly in the northern states. Also, industries like the railroad and steel industry received corporate welfare at the expense of the southern businessmen. Additionally, southern plantations were financed by the Northeast elite bankers and until 1808 these same businessmen supplied the slave ships that would transport blacks rounded up by other blacks on the African continent to the United States and other areas in the Caribbean after it was illegal to do so in the US. The southern chattel slavery economic profitability was on the downward trend as most economists expected maybe 5-10 years left in this business model.
It should also be noted once more that Lincoln offered the seven southern states “perpetual legal slavery” via the proposed 13th amendment (Corwin Amendment) if they re-entered the union. Not one state considered that. They really wanted independence and all the risks that entailed instead of a continued marriage to the northern states. Even if it meant that run-away slaves making their way to the United States (all but those seven states that seceded) would indeed be free and not be required by law to be returned as the Fugitive Slave Act mandated. Most people in the North did NOT want ex-slaves fleeing north to take the lowest paying jobs, as even Lincoln feared this.
With that long introduction and setting of context, there was an article that brought to light (for me anyway) what this internal conflict offered to the world. A clip from it said:
So in a very literal sense the Civil War was the first World War. It not only created a powerful nation of organized resources and potential military might, but the greater world wars took their pattern from the American one, even to the trench system Lee set up at Petersburg .. What this country brought to Europe was unconditional surrender. The actual phrase was used by Roosevelt in the Second World War, but it was not his phrase. Grant had delivered it to the Confederate Command at Fort Donelson in February, 1862. Its implication is total surrender or total destruction, or slavery, or whatever. A strange alternative to be delivered by one Christian state to another; and yet it had precedent in Sherman’s harrying the lands of Mississippi and Georgia ..
U.S. (Unconditional Surrender) Grant or William Tecumseh (Total War) Sherman transitioned warfare to not only be brutal for military personnel and civilians in proximity, but also back to the way pre-Christian influenced empires operated, the slaughtering/slaving of the people in conquered lands.
The nineteenth century abandoned God officially, and the faith of Christian communicants was absorbed into the powerful western will; and this will set out, openly at last, to know and control not only nature but the universe. In the late stages of any society there is always the aging form and the formlessness of the new pistis, but this is no new faith; it is a perversion of faith, the final and open acceptance of Machiavelli’s science of politics, the politics whose end is absolute power, whose technique is reason without any theological restraint.
The transition from a republic that was a federation of states to a democracy that makes politics a god, will always keep evolving lower and lower in morality as the narcissist leaders practice power over principles.
Sherman said “War is Hell,” and by this he meant total war, openly carried out upon the civil population, with the shrewd understanding that if the source of supply was cut off, the armies would dwindle and perish.
This policy was then brought to the American Indians, then to the Spanish empire after Spain was falsely accused of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba and to the Germans during WWI as well as the failure to include the Germans in the negotiated surrender, treating Germany like the North treated the South after the war with military districts, corrupt politics and the hatred of the people.
Yes, this part of the American “Exceptionalism” is rarely taught in schools or even in “approved” books. I would rather have American history taught in books like the authors of the Bible described the events of the Hebrew people, the nation Israel and the leaders of Jesus’ day .. communicating the good, the bad and the ugly.
Truth.
Truth-seekers these days have to expend a lot of effort to mine the accounts of days gone by, but it is written that “the truth shall set you free”
-SF1