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PrincetonUniversity |
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Memorial Service, Cannon Green Remarks by The events we have witnessed this past week are of an enormity that is almost beyond comprehension. We have experienced -- are experiencing -- a national trauma that will take a long time to heal. The resilience of our institutions and our society are being sorely tried. But they have been tried before and have survived, indeed have emerged from the trauma stronger and better than before. The greatest trial by fire occurred 140 years ago in the Civil War. At least 620,000 Americans lost their lives in that tragic conflict. This ghastly toll was 2 percent of the American population at the time. If 2 percent of the American people were to lose their lives in a war fought today, the number of American war dead would be 5 _ million. On another cataclysmic September day 139 years ago, Sept. 17, 1862, 6,000 soldiers were killed and mortally wounded in the battle of Antietam. Sixteen thousand more were wounded and survived their wounds, though many of them would live out their days missing an arm or a leg. Sept. 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest day in American history despite the horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001. In 1862, as today, Americans sought an explanation for such terrible carnage. What could justify the blood-letting of the battle of Antietam? In retrospect we know that it provided President Abraham Lincoln with the occasion to announce his Emancipation Proclamation, a crucial step in the process by which 4 million slaves achieved freedom, and the institution of slavery that had divided and disgraced America was abolished forever. The battle of Antietam also proved to be a critical turning point toward ultimate Union victory in the Civil War, a victory that preserved the United States as one nation, indivisible. But it did more than preserve a united nation. It kept alive the vision of a democratic political order and a republican form of government. That vision itself was on trial in the Civil War. The United States stood almost alone in the mid-19th century as a democratic republic in a world bestrode by kings, queens, princes, emperors, czars, petty dictators, and theories of aristocracy. Despite the anomaly of slavery in this boasted land of liberty, champions of human rights in other lands looked to the United States, in the words of one of them, as a "beacon of freedom whose radiance will light the whole world to triumph over the dark fiends of despotism, vice and wretchedness." Secession and civil war threatened to darken this beacon. The forces of reaction in Europe responded with expressions of smug satisfaction at the "immortal smash" of the now dis-United States as proof of "the failure of republican institutions in time of pressure," in the words of a British aristocrat. In 1862, during a dark period for the Union cause before the battle of Antietam, the conservative British leader Benjamin Disraeli stated his belief that the United States could never be cobbled together again and that the America of the future "will be an America of rival states and maneuvering Cabinets, of frequent turbulence, and of frequent war." But at that time of discouragement, President Lincoln declared his intention "to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or Congress and the country forsake me." He did maintain the contest until successful, but he also died at the very moment of success. It was left for an Englishman to spell out the consequences of that success. Edward Beesly was a liberal political economist at University College in London, a champion of greater democracy in Britain and a supporter of the Union cause in the American Civil War. In 1865, after Appomottox, he declared that "our opponents told us that republicanism was on trial" in the American Civil War. "They insisted on our watching what they called its breakdown. They told us that it was forever discredited in England. Well, we accepted the challenge. We staked our hopes boldly on the result. Under a strain such as no aristocracy, no monarchy, no empire could have supported, republican institutions have stood firm." The sacrifice of 6,000 lives at Antietam thus had meaning. American institutions proved resilient in the face of that extreme trial, giving encouragement that they will do so again. Yet we must remember that half of those who died at Antietam fought for the Confederacy, as did half of the 70 Princetonians who died in the Civil War. Princeton had to meet the test of reconciliation after the war -- which it did successfully. In the spirit of Lincoln's second inaugural address, delivered at the moment of imminent victory, let us also forswear malice even as we as a nation go forward "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us . . . .bind up the nation's wounds and do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
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