TAP Symposium: Postliberalism Post-Civil War
The universal is made known through the particular — this is the metaphysics of the Incarnation. I vehemently defend the particular because my heart begs for the universal, the Absolute.
The American Postliberal Symposium: Saving the American Union
The American Postliberal is pleased to present a symposium in consideration of how to solve our crisis of national unity, in light of the recent film “Civil War,” directed by Alex Garland. We firmly believe that a civil war is not only unlikely, but that a “national divorce” is unwarranted and would be destructive to the American way of life. Therefore, the question of how we maintain the common good and national cohesion in a time of great polarization is of the utmost importance. This week, we will explore the thinking behind the film, the probability of national disunity, and finally, why maintaining our union is critical to the postliberal political project. Read the third essay, “Postliberalism Post-Civil War” by Micah Paul Veillon, below.
A Georgia Tech alumni, Micah Paul Veillon hails from Rome, Georgia. His writing has appeared in The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The European Conservative, Moonshine & Magnolias, and VoegelinView, where he is a poet in residence.
The harvest moon had yet to gleam on Georgia when Atlanta fell in 1864. There was only darkness at that time — today it is darker still. General John Bell Hood sought to flee that darkness, but it seemed always hot on his scent; and so was Sherman. General William Sherman had chased Hood to the rolling foothills of Northwest Georgia.
He would rest in Kingston, a small town he passed through earlier in May during the Battle of Cassville. There he would establish a brief headquarters in October, restlessly awaiting the nod from Washington. In early November 1864, Sherman received permission from General Grant; permission to “make Georgia howl.” He then mounted his horse and left for Atlanta with flames breathing warm upon his back.
Professional historians will say Sherman’s March to the Sea began in Atlanta a week or so later. Perhaps they are right. But the fires started in Kingston, seven miles from my childhood home.
We are often told this was the price to preserve the Union, to save America. What is America, though, that her salvation came at such a cost?
President Lincoln, the man who decided to pay that price, offers us insight. In his mind, and words, America is an idea, something akin to an experiment. On July 4th of 1861, the inaugural year of the War Between the States, President Lincoln addressed the Congress:
Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled — the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains — its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion.1
For Lincoln, that remaining, unanswered point “embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or democracy — a government of the people by the same people — can or can not maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.”2
Was, though, that experiment in government of the people really by the same people — not just from the outset of said experiment, but when Beauregard fired on Sumter? I could refer here to Southern literary giants — John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson; I’ll turn, instead, to a Yankee alive at the time.
Upon traveling through the states to experience the matters of the war firsthand, Nathaniel Hawthore wrote what is by my estimation the leading exploration of the war. His essay, “Chiefly About War Matters,” was published in The Atlantic Monthly, detailing both his concerns about the war and the testimony of his eyes. It is a challenging read. In it, he states (forgive me for inserting such a lengthy quote):
It is a strange thing in human life, that the greatest errors both of men and women often spring from their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of warm-hearted, sympathetic, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal from the cause, but, because, between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by such plausible arguments as against that of the United States. The anomaly of two allegiances (of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man’s feeling, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law and had no symbol but a flag) is exceedingly mischievous in this point of view.3
To Hawthorne’s thought, there never existed any government against which treason was so easy as that of the United States because, in a way, it does not exist. Or, if it does, it exists as a hallucination of sorts — an airy mode of law and no symbol but a flag. For Hawthorne, men thus find it easy to forsake the impersonal, abstract, and dispassionate nature of an experiment for the particularly known and loved.
In that event, while experiments with ideas on parchment were underway in Philadelphia in 1787, we were continuing to cultivate our affection for the Georgia red clay. We were talking with a leisured drawl. We were filling the church pews on Sunday and closing Mainstreet. We were writing our own stories and singing our own songs. We were farming. We were in the country, wrestling with life in our hills and on our own bodies of water.
We were doing the same when Beauregard struck Sumter. We do much the same today. That — that thingness — was who we were. It is who we are. We were not experimenting. We were living. We still are living. Living differently, too, I might add, from the rest of the people falling under the shadow of the “Union.” A union, Hawthorne believed, that was “too vast, by far, to be taken into one small heart.”4 It was far too vast and far too different. It still is today. If, for instance, New York City is itself factional, dividing the affections of its citizens based on their place of birth and raising, how ought we to swallow the concept of America without choking?
We cannot and people are everywhere choking. Though born and raised in Georgia, I am one generation removed from the Cajun-French speaking heart of Louisiana: Acadiana. I spent my summers playing in Mamou, Eunice, and Ville Platte, by all means places as medieval as the modern world can afford (look up the Courir de Mardi Gras tradition which still breathes as I write). There, a language once was spoken that the federal government waged war upon on account of making Louisiana more American.5 A new variable threatened the experiment.
Through the persistence of their opponents, the Cajuns lost that war. Some of those in my grandparents’ generation still speak their forebearer's language; most in my father’s do not. Now, when I visit the Veillon family cemetery I cannot converse with my ancestors, and deep somewhere in my chest someone cries out to me in a language I do not understand. But I am led to believe alienation is a luxury of union?
Supposing, then, that America is an experiment, in her sinews the South is distinctly un-American. From birth, the nurturement of a Southerner’s soul is distinctly un-American. It is too particular; too set apart to be consumed by the pretense, the no-thingness of America; too still to be an experiment. We find no sympathy, for example, with the laissez-faire spirit animating the Pacific Coast, nor the calculating temper of the Northeast.
Flux and hurried life are alien to us; and the monstrous impulse to control nature which breathes life into the squalid oligarchs of Wall Street and Silicon Valley would suffocate in the Southern humidity. Mammon’s crooked fingers have yet to clasp the Blue Ridge Mountains, concerned of frostbite; and Dionysus does not dance in Southern pastures for fear of dewberry thorns.
Yet, all from the aforementioned places are considered Americans, all are countrymen? All share a commonwealth? A tangible commonwealth? The notion is outrageous to my mind. It all seems pretend; vapor; a malady in our imagination. And men were slaughtered for it.
We are, subsequently, left with new questions.
In a time where the dogmas of liberalism increasingly make us squirm, a great deal of ruckus has been raised surrounding the idea of “postliberalism.” Can a movement which is postliberal, though, which seeks to reject all phantoms for the real, embrace — or, indeed, promote — this idea of America?
Is the logic of this idea not also responsible for the chief crimes committed in the age of neoliberalism? Did Sherman not continue his march on into Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Did he not rise to rain hell on Cambodian fields? Did Lincoln’s thirst to answer a question that “embraces more than the fate of these United States” and concerns the “whole family of man” not extend itself right on into the Middle East? Puerto Rico? The Philippines?
We cannot help but stare back at the question posed in the beginning: Were those states really in national union? And if we were to miss the mark in our answer, as some are hell-bent on doing, it would not be for the first time. In general, President Lincoln seemed to believe that save for a few in South Carolina, the majority of people in Southern states were in support of the Union; especially the uppermost states — Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Missouri.
Therefore, on April 15th of 1861 he called for the raising of 75,000 troops to stomp out rebellion after Sumter with an easy mind. The response, however, was damning. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas would join the Confederacy in the coming weeks. Though Kentucky and Missouri would remain neutral, they wrote scathingly to Lincoln that “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States,” and that his request “is illegal, unconstitutional, revolutionary, inhuman, diabolical, and cannot be complied with.”6
Almost a month before Lincoln’s request, though, the Virginia legislature had voted against immediate secession. On April 17th, after the call to support invasion, Virginia Representative James B. Baldwin wrote of the seeming shift:
There are now no Union men in Virginia. But those who were Union men will stand to their arms and make a fight which shall go down in history as an illustration of what a brave people will do in defense of their liberties, after having exhausted every means of pacification.7
Lincoln then turned to General Lee, who himself abhorred the thought of secession and anticipated “no greater calamity” than dissolution. However, Robert E. Lee stopped to reflect on the Union he was being asked to save. He concluded to his son, Custis, “a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me.” It failed to charm him because if a union is being held together by swords and bayonets then it’s not a union. Those are antithetical things, and a man ought not be charmed by falsities.
So General Lee rode for Virginia over the Union, and Custis rode with his daddy.
Indeed, there is a deeper problem: the primary issue at hand irks our Christian morality; namely because this imagined community (to borrow from sociologist Benedict Anderson) is readily idolized.
The final essay in Who Owns America? (the sequel to the masterful Southern Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand) was penned by the profound, English Catholic, Hilaire Belloc. Simply entitled “The Modern Man,” it delves into the nature of us moderns after the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, industrialism, and capitalism.
Modern man has lost, according to Belloc, many things; chief among them is his “doctrinal position on transcendental things which was that of his immediate ancestry.”8 The consequences of this are culturally calamitous. However, because he can never lose his nature and “must worship something,” for modern man there “has been substituted for this ancient worship the worship of the community of which he is a member. There is a new religion which is not exactly the worship of the State, but the worship of the collective body (formerly called England, now quite commonly called the Empire), of which the individual is a member.”9
This worship, like all forms it inhabits, demands sacrifice, and not just of comfort, but of life — think only of World Wars I and II, not to mention almost every other war since the French Revolution. It also requires new myths, new symbols, and new sacred relics whose desecration could provoke excommunication. Belloc claimed, “men carry in their minds symbols … externalized in the shape of a map or a picture, representing that which is their object of worship.”10 Maps like those of the United States, which create a mirage of unity in a land where differing ways of life are allergic to one another.
The illusions of commonwealth that the bulk of empires heretofore have sketched, whether they be Roman, English, or American, must therefore be unshackled from our imaginations. We must embrace the real. Only that will take us beyond liberalism.
Now, I am aware of a certain affinity for the Roman Empire in Catholic circles. I understand this sentiment. In some ways I share the feeling. I will only say: the Roman Empire did not advance the tenets of the Gospel — indeed, it fought them at almost every turn — it did not spread the way of Christ, the Christian form.
Instead, the blood of the Martyrs did; through their friendship, their journeys to particularities guided by the Holy Spirit, equipped with its gifts. Their blood spread the essence of our faith — the Cross — with every drop. Indeed, their blood drowned Rome. It swallowed up the swallower — Death has been swallowed up in victory. Like a parasite, Christendom consumed Rome from the inside out. Something similar must occur once more.
To conclude, I am also aware that I may fall under the accusation of relativism, or a subjective localism denying a universal governing order which permeates unity throughout the hierarchy of being. To make such a claim, however, would reveal profound metaphysical and anthropological malpractice.
The universal is made known through the particular — this is the metaphysics of the Incarnation. I vehemently defend the particular because my heart begs for the universal, the Absolute; I have come to know the latter by way of the former. The whippoorwill, for instance, has taught me greatly about heaven, and I have seen Christ in untidy faces fishing the Coosa River.
The universal is real, imperial even. But Christ could only be the universal unifier if he could have been missed walking down the streets of Jerusalem, if you could have cast a stone and hit him, or smelt the wine on his breath; only if he were brought forth from the Blessed Mother in the smallness of the stable, in the stillness of the night while the whole world slept.
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Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol I: Fort Sumter to Perryville, pg. 68.
Ibid.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chiefly About War Matters,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1862 Issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/07.
Ibid.
A thorough telling of this history can be read in “The French Language in Louisiana Law and Legal Education: A Requiem,” in the Louisiana Law Review.
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol I: Fort Sumter to Perryville.
Henry Alexander White, Robert E Lee and the Southern Confederacy, pg. 95.
Hilaire Belloc, “The Modern Man,” Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, pg. 432.
Ibid, p. 433.
Ibid.
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Thank you kindly for allowing me to participate in the symposium. It was a pleasure writing this for it.
This is certainly the best article The American PostLiberal has produced thus far, although that may be the bias of my love for the particular, my southern home, speaking, but isn’t that how it should be?