The Treasury of Virtue
Excerpted from The Legacy of the Civil War, By Robert Penn Warren, pp. 60-65
The Treasury of Virtue, which is the psychological heritage left to the North by the Civil War, may not be as comic or vicious as the Great Alibi, but it is equally unlovely. It may even be, in the end, equally corrosive of national, and personal, integrity. If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed. He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history.
The Northerner feels redeemed, for he, being human tends to rewrite history to suit his own deep needs, he may not, in fact, publish this history, but it lies open on a lectern in some arcane recess of his being, ready for his devotional perusal. He knows, as everybody knows—and as Lincoln, with sardonic understatement, said—that slavery was the
sine qua non of the war. But that
sine qua non is not enough for the deep need of justification. Even “almost all,” if the all is salted with psychological and historical realism, is not enough. The
sine qua non has to become a secretly enshrined icon of a boy in blue striking off, with one hand, iron shackles from a grizzle-headed Uncle Tom weeping in gratitude, and with the other passing out McGuffey’s First Reader to a roly-poly pickaninny laughing in hope.
When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten. In the happy contemplation of the Treasury of Virtue.
• It is forgotten that the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed, and that the Republicans were ready, in 1861, to guarantee slavery in the South, as bait for a return to the Union.
• It is forgotten that in July, 1861, both houses of Congress, by an almost unanimous vote, affirmed that the war was waged not to interfere with the institutions of any state but to only maintain the Union. The War, in the words of the House resolution, should cease “as soon as these objects are accomplished.”
• It is forgotten that the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on September 23, 1862, was limited and provisional: slavery was to be abolished only in the seceded states and only if they did not return to the Union before the first of the next January (1863).
• It is forgotten that the Proclamation was widely disapproved and even contributed to the serious setbacks to Republican candidates for office in the subsequent election.
• It is forgotten that, as Lincoln himself freely admitted, the proclamation itself was of doubtful constitutional warrant and was forced by circumstances; that only after a bitter and prolonged struggle in Congress was the Thirteenth Amendment sent, as late as January, 1865, to the States for ratification; and that all of Lincoln's genius as a horse trader (here the deal was Federal patronage swapped for Democratic votes) was needed to get Nevada admitted to Statehood, with its guaranteed support of the Amendment.
• It is forgotten that even after the Fourteenth Amendment, not only Southern States, but Northern ones, refused to adopt Negro suffrage, and that Connecticut had formally rejected it a late as July, 1865.
• It is forgotten that Sherman, and not only Sherman, was violently opposed to arming Negroes against white troops.
• It is forgotten that, as Bell Irvin Wiley has amply documented in
The Life of Billy Yank, racism was all too common in the liberating army.
• It is forgotten that only the failure of Northern volunteering overcame the powerful prejudice against accepting Negro troops, and allowed "Sambo's Right to be Kilt," -- as the title of a contemporary song had it.
• It is forgotten that racism and Abolitionism might, and often did, go hand in hand. This was true even in the most instructed circles [as James T. Ayers, a clergyman, and a committed abolitionist acting as a recruiting officer for Negro troops confided to his diary his fear that freed Negroes would push North and "soon they will be in every whole and Corner, and the Bucks will be wanting to galant our Daughters Round."
• It is forgotten that Lincoln, at Charlestown, Illinois, in 1858, formally affirmed: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”
• It is forgotten that as late as 1862 he said to Negro leaders visiting the White House: “Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race…It is better for us both to be separated.”
• It is forgotten, in fact, that history is history.
Despite all this, the war appears, according to the doctrine of the Treasury of Virtue, as a consciously undertaken crusade so full of righteousness that there is enough overplus stored in Heaven, like the deeds of the saints, to take care of all small failings and oversights of the descendants of the crusaders, certainly unto the present generation.
Respectfully,
William