“Who’s that man on the horse?”…

…I asked my father at a young age. “That’s Lee—he led a Southern army in the Civil War.” He gave me a book I still have, Illustrated Minute Biographies, by William DeWitt. Published 1953, it is utterly non-judgmental. Opposite the page on Lee (“Leader of a Lost Cause”) is a page on Lenin (“Father of the Russian Revolution.”)

Among DeWitt’s 150 personalities, Lee fascinated. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs. The moral injustice which the Civil War ended didn’t initially register. Nor did the enormity of Lee’s decision over which side to support. Civil War themes were popular. We kids wore replica Yankee and rebel soldier’s caps, not really knowing much about why they fought.

But the New York City public school system taught serious history in those days, and soon corrected our ignorance. Our teachers introduced us to the great wrongs of slavery and secession. They showed us the genius of Lincoln; the skill of Grant; the valiant, brilliant resistance of Lee.

As a child of that time I was saddened over the recent rush to pull down memorials to him—“less about understanding the past than a contest to divide us,” as Dan McLaughlin wrote. A better response is to erect more statues, as Hillsdale College did for Frederick Douglass—replying to history with more history.

Allen Guelzo’s new Lee biography is unmatched as an example of history taught with balance and understanding, as it was when I went to school. George Will thinks its timing couldn’t be better: “In today’s blizzard of facile, overheated, and grandstanding judgments about the past, this unsentimental biography illustrates the intellectual responsibility that the present owes to the past.”

Woke villain

Of course the first question one asks is: Why Lee? Especially now, when he’s a leading villain of the Woke Movement? Dr. Guelzo explained in an illuminating podcast with former Speaker Newt Gingrich. He actually began in 2014, before the advent of national distemper. Fired up, he had just published a best-seller on Gettysburg.

He focused on Lee because, compared to giants like Lincoln, Grant and Sherman, he was relatively underwritten. True, there were early hagiographies, and a Pulitzer-winning four volumes by Douglas Southall Freeman in the 1930s. But otherwise the field was relatively open.

Admittedly, it’s a challenge to write about someone many consider a traitor. Guelzo, a “northern Yankee,” defines the job as “difficult biography, like writing about Neville Chamberlain.” That is part of the fascination of his book—amplified by his skill in exposing Lee’s true character, the great impulses that drove him, and the decisions which placed him athwart the nation he loved and had sworn to protect and defend.

Truant Virginian

It takes 200 pages to get to that point, and the build-up is anything but dull. Lee last saw his father at the age of six. Washington’s famous cavalry general, Light-Horse Harry Lee, onetime Virginia governor, went through several fortunes and ruined himself, spending his last years in the West Indies. That left Robert with two powerful compulsions: perfection, to make up for his father’s shortcomings; and security, which his father’s profligacy had denied him.

Only in his last five years, as the unlikely president of a small college in Lexington, did Lee achieve those goals; remarkably, he was as effective a fundraiser as a military strategist. He raised what became Washington and Lee University from bankruptcy to prominence.

Lee commanded no troops in the field until he served under Winfield Scott in the Mexican War (1846-48). He was educated at West Point, America’s premier engineering school before the Civil War. He returned later as superintendent (1852-55), hating every minute of it, for he despised paperwork and interfering politicians.

The work he most enjoyed was building things: Savannah’s Fort Pulaski and improvements at other Army installations. In 1839 he changed the course of the Mississippi River and rebuilt the St. Louis waterfront.

Ironically, between West Point and Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton, Lee spent more early adult years in New York than in Virginia. Arlington House in Alexandria County, the Lee home for 30 years, was part of the District of Columbia until 1846, and Lee never even owned it. Yet it was Virginia which commanded his loyalty in 1861.

The hinge of fate

Lee’s fateful decisions were threefold. In February 1861, seven states seceded to form the Confederacy. On 18 April Lee turned down Lincoln’s offer to command the Union Army. “If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South,” Lee exclaimed, “I would sacrifice them all to the Union: but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?”

Scott and Lincoln assured him there was no chance of this, but the next day Virginia seceded and joined the Confederacy. Tearfully Scott begged: “For God’s sake, don’t resign.” “I am compelled to,” Lee cried. “I can’t consult my feelings in this matter.”

“There is no glimpse of Lee thinking his way through the contradiction slavery posed to the American founding or the natural rights of the enslaved,” Guelzo writes. Though he freed Arlington’s slaves, to Lee they were “personally invisible, despite their presence all around.” Late in the war, he favored offering freedom to slaves who would fight with his army, and some did. The reaction of the army was “at best ambivalent.”

Lee’s thinking began with family: All his children possessed lay in Virginia. “They will be ruined if they do not go with their State. I cannot raise my hand against my children.” If he had, the state militia might have seized Arlington (in the event, the Union did). But remaining neutral would have made him a traitor in the eyes of both sides. So Lee could only hope that Virginia would not secede. “Save in her defense there will be one soldier less in the world than now.”

Save in her defense…. A day later found Lee in Richmond, where he hoped to mediate a peaceful settlement. There was none, and on 22 April he placed himself “at the service of my native state.”

Strategist and tactician

The accounts of Lee’s campaigns are brisk and revelatory without dunning us with detail. (Unfortunately, detail is sometimes lacking in the accompanying maps.) Twice taking the war to Union territory was the right strategy, Guelzo says.

We see the agate points at which, had things gone otherwise, Lee might have forced an armistice. Guelzo discounts the rumor that Lee and McClellan, neither defeated after Antietam, considered marching jointly on Washington, confronting Lincoln and compelling a settlement.

McClellan didn’t have that much imagination. He failed to press Lee at Antietam, as Lee had anticipated. “Some day,” Lee cracked, “they’re going to have a general I don’t understand.” (Some day they did.)

Lee was overly romanticized after the war, but contrary to recent criticisms, we see an audacious strategist whose attacks when he was expected to retreat won battle after battle. Tactics he usually left to subordinates, who were not always of the first caliber. When they were, the results were astonishing.

Norman Schwarzkopf, says the author, overwhelmed Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in the 1991 Gulf War with the same sweeping flanking movement of Chancellorsville, where Lee allowed Stonewall Jackson to attack with his whole corps, risking everything—and ultimately losing Jackson himself.

Even at Gettysburg, Guelzo suggests, Lee’s strategy on day three was not all wrong. Union General Meade, broadly beaten the first two days, was actually preparing to retreat when George Pickett charged Cemetery Ridge. The rebels failed through the valor of Union troops who, though badly mauled earlier were determined not to yield. Pickett was asked later why he failed. “The Yankees fought,” he drawled.

Was Lee a traitor?

At Hampton Roads in January 1865, Lincoln met with Confederate plenipotentiaries inquiring about an armistice. There would be none, he declared, short of reestablishing “our one common country” and abolishing slavery. One asked whether that meant “we of the South have committed treason.” Lincoln replied, “You have stated the proposition better than I did.”

Dr. Guelzo is thoughtful on this question as applied to Lee. He meets the constitutional definition: “levying war against [the United States] or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” At the same time the author cites serious constitutional obstacles to convicting Lee (he was indicted, but never tried).

First, Grant had paroled Lee and his top officers at Appomattox, and a paroled prisoner-of-war cannot be classified legally as a traitor. Even Lincoln insisted that the Confederacy had no standing as a nation. It was an enemy, but not a foreign enemy. America’s greatest convulsion was a family affair—a war not only between states, but between households, kinsmen, brethren.

Conscious of his parole, Lee gave no encouragement to his indictors. He discouraged Jubal Early from a guerrilla movement which would “prolong bitter feeling and postpone the period when reason and charity may resume their sway.” He opposed a monument to Confederate war dead, which “would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating,” peaceful recovery.

Well, Dr. Guelzo says, he didn’t say that monument might not be deserved; and he took “no positive steps to cooperate with Reconstruction.” Given Lee’s devotion to his troops, for him to say no monument was deserved was inconceivable. And his last five years at Washington College were reconstructive. He never spoke at die-hard rallies, or gave encouragement to bitter-enders. But perhaps doing nothing is not enough.

“Absorbing society’s defaulters”

The nation-state with all its faults, Guelzo concludes, provides “a frail but workable insurance against the kinds of incessant dynastic, ethnic and religious warfare that used to be the common lot of the human race…. To wave away treason as a crime is to put in jeopardy many of the benefits the nation-state has conferred.”

That is a valid observation, but the author continues: “…perhaps the reluctance to pin [treason on Lee] is a token of an instinct, running back to the Constitutional Convention, to err on the side of absorbing society’s defaulters, rather than arching them to the scaffold.” He quotes the abolitionist Wendell Phillips: “We cannot cover the continent with gibbets. We cannot sicken the 19th century with such a sight.”

No, or the 21st century likewise.

Most of Lee’s class owned slaves, yet he told Confederate President Jefferson Davis that slavery was a curse that must go. But he didn’t think about when and how—nor did quite a few people, North and South. A century hence, if there are still historians, will they marvel over some of our slipshod thinking today?

Modern scolds may be outraged that Allen Guelzo has written this majestic biography. He will be called names for his trouble. But Dr. Guelzo quotes the literary critic John Gardner: “No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion.” The two have to meet, he says.

“Malice toward none; charity for all.” In their interview, Speaker Gingrich observes that Lincoln has affected him. “Yes,” says our author, “I believe so.”

Further reading

“Churchill’s Fantasy: If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”

“Robert E. Lee and the Fashionable Urge to Hide from History“

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“Sir Winston’s Gettysburg essay…

...is a fantasy which transcends all my objections to exploring the what-ifs and might-have-beens in that great war.” —Shelby Foote

“If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, December 1930 (Cohen C344). It resurfaced a year later in a collection of alternate histories, If It had Happened Otherwise (Cohen B43). Its last appearance, in 1975, was in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, (Cohen 286). A copy is available by email for personal use but not for reproduction. —RML

Paul Alkon on Churchill at Gettysburg

Dr. Paul A. Alkon was Bing Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. His appreciation of Churchill’s Gettysburg alternative history is the best I’ve read. It is excerpted below from Paul’s book, Winston Churchill’s Imagination, by kind permission of Ellen Alkon. To this I added brief excerpts (italics) from Churchill’s actual 1930 essay.

1930: Gettysburg imagined

“Once a great victory is won it dominates not only the future but the past…. Still it may amuse an idle hour [if] we meditate for a spell upon the debt we owe to those Confederate soldiers who by a deathless feat of arms broke the Union front at Gettysburg and laid open a fair future to the world.”¹

Experience in battle on four continents gave Churchill a horror of war. He also gained an ability to imagine alternate scenarios. It is shocking to realize that the worst possible outcome after the First World War came to be, just two decades later. Contemplating the causes of that war, Churchill with his historic imagination conjured up a scenario which might have prevented it—in 1863.

“If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” is Churchill’s only freestanding speculation about a different historical outcome. It is a classic of the genre “alternative history” in science fiction. Some historians refer to it—often suspiciously—as “counterfactual history.”

Churchill presents his story as written in a world where Lee did win the Battle of Gettysburg. As a consequence the South won the American Civil War. Implausibly from our viewpoint, we are told that Lee’s victory precipitated a sequence of events leading to the abolition of slavery, closer links among the English-Speaking Peoples, avoidance of the First World War, and the prospect of a United States of Europe led by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

1863: Lee the Emancipator

“If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy towards the African negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of Western Europe, that opened the high roads along which we are now marching so prosperously.”*

As the story unfolds, Lee’s army marches victoriously to Washington, Lincoln’s government having fled to New York. Here Churchill must explain how Lee acquired plenary authority. Churchill deftly explains that Gettysburg threw Confederate President Jefferson Davis “irresistibly, indeed almost unconsciously, into the shade.” There is a grain of reality here, for Lee had warned Davis that slavery was the unacceptable wrong that would doom their cause. The North began the war fighting against Secession, Churchill explains. But “the moral issue of slavery had first sustained and then dominated the political quarrel.”

1905: The “English-Speaking Association”

Given the North’s preponderance of wealth and industry, losing at Gettysburg would not have daunted Abraham Lincoln. But in Churchill’s vision, “Lee’s declaration abolishing slavery…undermined the obduracy of the Northern States:

“Lincoln no longer rejected the Southern appeal for independence. ‘If,’ he declared…‘our brothers in the South are willing faithfully to cleanse this continent of negro slavery, and if they will dwell beside us in goodwill as an independent but friendly nation, it would not be right to prolong the slaughter on the question of sovereignty alone’…. The Treaty of Harper’s Ferry, which was signed between the Union and Confederate States on 6 September 1863, embodied the two, fundamental propositions: that the South was independent, and the slaves were free.”* 

The United and Confederate States of America, riven after Gettysburg, thus become permanent republics. They live peaceably side by side—both armed to the teeth—through 1905. When war scares erupt in Europe, they join with Great Britain to form the “English-Speaking Association.” The signatories are President Theodore Roosevelt, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, and Woodrow Wilson, “the enlightened Virginian chief of the Southern Republic.” Not a decade later, the “E.S.A.” forestalls world catastrophe.

1914: “Saved! Saved! Saved!”

Everyone remembers the perilous days of 1914, Churchill writes. The murder of the Austrian Archduke precipitated general mobilization. It was “the most dangerous conjunction which Europe has ever known. It seemed that nothing could avert a war which might well have become Armageddon itself.” Desultory firing had already broken out when the English-Speaking Association

“…tendered its friendly offices to all the mobilized Powers, counselling them to halt their armies within ten miles of their own frontiers, and to seek a solution of their differences by peaceful discussion. The memorable document added ‘that failing a peaceful outcome the Association must deem itself ipso facto at war with any Power in either combination whose troops invaded the territory of its neighbour.’ Although this suave yet menacing communication was received with indignation in many quarters, it in fact secured for Europe the breathing space which was so desperately required.”*

The French Republic, the Emperor Franz Joseph and Czar Nicholas quickly acceded to the E.S.A.’s “friendly offices.” The German Kaiser was the last to agree. Some say Wilhelm was determined on war regardless. Others insist he uttered “a scream of joy and fell exhausted into a chair, exclaiming, ‘Saved! Saved! Saved!’”

Our world as dystopian and improbable

Churchill’s imaginary resident of this imaginary world speculates in vintage prose about what dreadful events Lee’s victory prevented. Had the Union triumphed, armies of carpetbaggers might have descended to exploit the newly freed slaves. The South, simmering in resentment, might have invoked racial oppression. Benjamin Disraeli, that Liberal reformer, might have become a Tory! “The sabres of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry and the bayonets of Pickett’s division” turned William Gladstone from a Liberal to a “revivified Conservative.” (In reality, of course, Disraeli was the Tory, Gladstone the Liberal.) Churchill waxes lyrical in his fantasy:

“Once the perils of 1914 had been successfully averted and the disarmament of Europe had been brought into harmony with that already effected by the E.S.A., the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ was bound to occur continually. The glittering spectacle of the great English-Speaking combination, its assured safety, its boundless power, the rapidity with which wealth was created and widely distributed within its bounds, the sense of buoyancy and hope which seemed to pervade the entire populations; all this pointed to European eyes a moral which none but the dullest could ignore.”*

The reader sees from a surprisingly utopian perspective, our own world as both dystopian and implausible. So the narrator mentions Jan Bloch’s once-famous book, The Future of War, which predicted with what proved remarkably accurate military detail the devastation that would attend war between major European states. But Bloch insisted that such a war would never happen.²

But Churchill asks: Suppose it had? A prostrate Europe might have descended into depression, unemployment, Bolshevism and fascism. Why, today in Britain the income tax might even be 25%! (In actuality, as we sadly know, all those things happened.)

1932: Implausible reality

The brilliance of Churchill’s essay also lies in his decision to shift its narrative viewpoint. We readers must not only consider the consequences of a Confederate victory—including the absence of the First World War. We must also imagine how inconceivable our world might seem if things had worked out differently.

“Whether the Emperor Wilhelm II will be successful in carrying the project of European unity forward by another important stage at the forthcoming Pan-European Conference at Berlin in 1932 is still a matter of prophecy. Should he achieve his purpose he will have raised himself to a dazzling pinnacle of fame and honour…and no one will be more pleased than the members of the E.S.A. to witness the gradual formation of another great area of tranquility and cooperation like that in which we ourselves have learned to dwell….”*

Churchill’s political imagination also allows him to portray dramatically different outcomes of a situation. So he invokes the implausibility of what actually happened—the gigantic slaughter of the Civil War and First World War. This foreshadows the rhetoric which in 1940 rallied his country by inviting contemplation of a Nazi victory. Too many dismissed such a thought. But Churchill knew a Hitler triumph would plunge the world “into the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

That chilling thought acquires much of its power by inviting imagination of one possible future: An alternative, feudal period, and technological development more accelerated than anything during the medieval era.

“Broad, sunlit uplands”

In June 1940, Churchill invited Britons to think of the worst possible outcome of Britain’s fight against Hitler’s Germany—not as a unique situation, incomparable with anything that had gone before, but also an alternative past wrenched out of time. He then invokes the more desirable outcome: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.”³ Churchill’s skill as an alternative historian notably enhanced the rhetoric that he so famously mobilized for war.

“If this prize should fall to his Imperial Majesty, he may perhaps reflect how easily his career might have been wrecked in 1914 by the outbreak of a war which might have cost him his throne, and have laid his country in the dust. If today he occupies in old age the most splendid situation in Europe, let him not forget that he might well have found himself eating the bitter bread of exile, a dethroned sovereign and a broken man loaded with unutterable reproach. And this, we repeat, might well have been his fate, if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg.”*

Endnotes

¹ Winston S. Churchill, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), IV Churchill at Large, 73. All subsequent italicized excerpts (*) are from this edition, pages 73-84.

² Ivan (Jan) Bloch, The Future of War in Its Technical, Economic and Political Relations: Is War Now Impossible?, trans. R.C. Long (Boston: Ginn, 1899). abridged edition, also 1899.

³ “Their Finest Hour,” House of Commons, 18 June 1940, in Winston S. Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears (New York: Putnam, 1941), 314.

“Who’s that man on the horse?” I asked my father at the age of about seven. “That’s Lee, ” my dad said; “he led the Southern army in the Civil War.”

He gave me a book which I still have. Illustrated Minute Biographies: 150 Fascinating Life-stories of Famous People, from the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day, Dramatized with Portraits and Scenes from Their Lives, by Willam A. DeWitt. It’s still available and inexpensive. It’s far out of date now, but still a fine read for the young.

I scoured that book—an equal-opportunity education. (Opposite Lee’s page is a page on Lenin.) It was very balanced biography for 1953—completely non-judgmental. There was no rote criticism of villains, no worship of heroes. Lee was “Leader of a Lost Cause.” Lenin was “Father of the Russian Revolution.” I think it gave me the experience Churchill described, when as a young man he read everything he could lay hands on:

It was a curious education. First because I approached it with an empty, hungry mind, and with fairly strong jaws; and what I got I bit; secondly because I had no one to tell me: “This is discredited.” “You should read the answer to that by so and so; the two together will give you the gist of the argument.” “There is a much better book on that subject,” and so forth.

Learning about Lee

Early on, the vast moral wrong which the Civil War corrected didn’t register. Civil War themes were popular. I remember us kids wearing replica Union and Rebel soldier’s caps, not really knowing much about why they fought. The New York City public school system fixed all that. In those days, public schools taught American history to a fare-thee-well.

Our teachers introduced us to the War’s great issues of slavery and secession. They showed us the genius of Abraham Lincoln; the skill of Ulysses S. Grant; the stubborn, valiant, brilliant, foredoomed resistance of Lee. I’ve always had a soft spot for underdogs. Before I ran into Winston Churchill, Lee was my hero. That’s why I was dumfounded and saddened, over the mad rush to pull down statues and memorials to him in an effort to deny us our awareness of history.

I hold no brief for John C. Calhoun, who argued for slavery as “the greater good,” or Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President. But I wouldn’t pull down their statues. Instead I’d put up opposite a statue of, say, Frederick Douglass (whose bronze image is on the campus of Hillsdale College). The British have this sensible approach in some places. In Parliament Square, along with Jan Christian Smuts, there’s now a statue of Nelson Mandela. And Mohandas Gandhi is there now, with Winston Churchill—silent testimony to the fact that they ended up admiring each other.

Why remember Lee?

“The Great Compromise”

Shelby Foote, a literate and readable Civil War historian, offered worthy and fine words on what he called “The Great Compromise,” in place in America at least since the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, and certainly at the final encampment in 1938:

It consists of Southerners admitting, freely, that it was best that the Union wasn’t divided. And the North admits, rather freely, that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. That is the Great Compromise, and we live with that, and it works for us. We are now able to look at the War with some coolness, which we couldn’t do 100 years ago…. All that’s over now. The Great Compromise obtains.

This is a far more sensitive and caring point of view than that of the Woke Culture. It would be regressive to replace that coolness—which took a century to develop—with the old welter of grievances that followed the Civil War.

On the tearing down of statues and symbols, Foote cited a state senator, who got her fellow senators to disallow the use of a Confederate symbol—not the Battle Flag—by the Daughters of the Confederacy. “I don’t understand that,” he said. “It’s a violation of the Compromise. It’s an arousal of bitterness. Now she, along with a great many others, do not want to be reminded. She has every right to want to hide from history if she wants to. But it seems to me that she’s trying to hide history from us—and that’s a mistake.”

Brothers

Who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning roll call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again hastily to don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the Long Roll summons us to battle.

Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise. All will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well. And there will be talking and laughter and cheers. And all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?

—Berry Benson (1843-1923), Company H, 1st South Carolina Regiment, Hill’s Division, Army of Northern Virginia

So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital, to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat. —Churchill, House of Commons, 12 November 1936

Brexit Bedlam

For me the most adroit analysis of Britain’s Brexit Bedlam we can read to date was by Andrew Roberts in the Sunday Telegraph. You can register for free to read the article.

Will this be the year May ends before April? If Prime Minister Theresa May lasts through 5/31, Roberts says she will beat Gordon Brown (two years, 319 days) and the Duke of Wellington (two years, 320 days). Big whoopee.

Dr. Roberts goes on to opine what the right course would have been from the outset:

The cautious, bishop-like approach when she became prime minister would have been to have prepared business, the civil service and the country for a managed, World Trade Organisation-based, no-deal Brexit, without giving Brussels any guarantees on security, future domicile status for EU citizens, a divorce pay-out or indeed anything else until a negotiating timetable was agreed that was fair to both sides. Any fifth columnists in the Civil Service who were actively undermining the strategy should have been demoted; it would not have taken long for the rest to have got the message. The squealing of the Remainers would have been loud and long—especially of course on the BBC—but nothing like as bad as it has been.

Many colleagues reply to this by saying, “Sure, but hindsight is cheap.” Au contraire. Mrs. May, who is an admirable PM in many respects, had those options from the get-go. She knew she had them. She rejected them. Brexit still offers them. It is not likely that she will opt for them.

Churchill and Europe: Then

It almost seemed that every speaker at the recent Hillsdale College Churchill Conference was asked about Brexit in one way or another. We convened to study Churchill and the movies, one of them “Henry V.” Another kerfuffle with the French, but 600 years ago. The best insight into Churchill’s thinking is his own words. So when asked about Brexit I offered two Churchill quotations:

We are not seeking in the European movement … to usurp the functions of Government. I have tried to make this plain again and again to the heads of the Government. We ask for a European assembly without executive power.” —House of Commons, 10 December 1948

* * *

At Zürich in 1946 I appealed to France to take the lead in Europe by making friends with the Germans, “burying the thousand-year quarrel.” … As year by year the project advanced, the Federal Movement in many European countries who participated became prominent. It has in the last two years lost much of its original force. The American mind jumps much too lightly over its many difficulties. I am not opposed to a European Federation including (eventually) the countries behind the Iron Curtain, provided that this comes about naturally and gradually.

But I never thought that Britain or the British Commonwealths should, either individually or collectively, become an integral part of a European Federation, and have never given the slightest support to the idea. We should not, however, obstruct but rather favour the movement to closer European unity and try to get the United States’ support in this work. —Memorandum to the Cabinet, 29 November 1951

Churchill and Europe: Now?

That answer was incomplete, so a second question arose. “You gave us two Churchill quotes in which he opposed Britain joining a federal Europe. Does that mean you think he would be in favor of Brexit?”

Answer: No. To so conclude would violate his daughter’s First Commandment. Lady Soames always said, “Thou shalt not declare what Papa would say about any modern issue. After all, how do YOU know?”

I offered those quotes only to refute the opposite argument we hear all the time. Because Churchill wanted Franco-German rapprochement after World War II, he would now favor the creation of a European super-state.

Theresa May has much to answer for before the bar of history. But it is unfair to blame her alone for the current shambles of irresolution. The mistakes began long ago, under governments both Labour and Tory. They led to de Gaulle‘s rejection of British membership in the European Economic Community in the 1960s. After he’d left, Britain applied to join again. Even then, Britain joined a free trade association, not a federal union regulated by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

“If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election”

In 1930, Churchill wrote a marvelous essay, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg.” It is presented as if written by someone in an alternate world where Lee DID win the battle of Gettysburg. This precipitated (implausibly from our viewpoint) a sequence of events leading to the abolition of slavery, a fraternal association of English-Speaking Peoples, the prevention of World War I, and with it German fascism and Russian Bolshevism. By 1930 there is the prospect of a Council of Europe led by Kaiser Wilhelm.

I have written, but not yet published, a parallel essay entitled “If Churchill Had Not Won the 1945 Election.” Using some of his phrases, it explains how Churchill DID win, resulting (also implausibly from our viewpoint), in a prosperous, reinvigorated British Commonwealth, a rollback of Soviet expansion, a free Poland, an Arab-Israeli settlement, a democratic China, the evolution of Iran to a constitutional monarchy. It ends with the prospect of a Latin American free trade association led by Che Guevara. Che, an educated, practical man, has pronounced communism a failure and deposed Castro.

Safely reelected in 1945, Churchill renounces the Dunbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods agreements, in which the United States demanded an end to Imperial Preference. Britain then organizes SAFTA, the Sterling Area Free Trade Association. The first of its kind, SAFTA spans the British Commonwealth, including India and Pakistan. They both get independence, but only after the border questions are settled and millions of lives saved by avoiding strife. SAFTA gets along fine with the U.S. and Europe. Free trade blossoms in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Back to Reality

The mistakes leading to the present Brexit debacle began with abandoning Imperial Preference. Churchill himself had supported that from 1932. Failing to render the Commonwealth a free-trade association of independent states hammered home the error.

So on Brexit, we must NOT proclaim what Churchill would say about a situation he never contemplated.

As for the present Brexit shambles, a Norwegian friend of mine offered an answer. “The best thing to do would be to go back to 1945 and start all over again.”

“We think we are wholly superior people,” said the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. The 50th and 75th Anniversaries of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg were poignant, inspiring moments. The words spoken of those occasions give cause to wonder. In the welter of emotions, have we forgotten what we need to remember?

“We may be given to meet again…”

Shelby Foote:

We think we are wholly superior people. If we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we’d never have fought that Civil War. But since we did fight it, we have to make it the greatest war of all times. And our generals were the greatest generals of all time. It’s very American to do that.

“Who knows,” Berry Benson, a Gettysburg veteran asked, as his narrative drew towards its close, “Who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning roll call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again hastily to don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the Long Roll summons us to battle.

“Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise. All will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well. And there will be talking and laughter and cheers. And all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?”

The Civil War “is not ‘was,’ it’s ‘is.'”

Barbara Fields:

William Faulkner said once that history is not “was,” it’s “is.” And what we need to remember is that the Civil War “is” in the present, as well as the past.

The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future also established a standard that will not mean anything until we finish the work.

“Under One Flag Now”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gettysburg, 3 July 1938:

On behalf of the people of the United States I accept this monument in the spirit of brotherhood and peace.

Immortal deeds and immortal words have created here at Gettysburg a shrine of American patriotism. We encompass “The last full measure of devotion” of many men and by the words in which Abraham Lincoln expressed the simple faith for which they died.

It seldom helps to wonder how a statesman of one generation would surmount the crisis of another. A statesman deals with concrete difficulties—with things which must be done from day to day. Not often can he frame conscious patterns for the far off future.

* * *

But the fullness of the stature of Lincoln’s nature and the fundamental conflict which events forced upon his Presidency invite us ever to turn to him for help.

For the issue which he restated here at Gettysburg seventy five years ago will be the continuing issue before this Nation so long as we cling to the purposes for which the Nation was founded—to preserve under the changing conditions of each generation a people’s government for the people’s good.

The task assumes different shapes at different times. Sometimes the threat to popular government comes from political interests, sometimes from economic interests, sometimes we have to beat off all of them together.

But the challenge is always the same—whether each generation facing its own circumstances can summon the practical devotion to attain and retain that greatest good for the greatest number which this government of the people was created to ensure.

Lincoln spoke in solace for all who fought upon this field; and the years have laid their balm upon their wounds. Men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray are here together, a fragment spared by time. They come here by the memories of old divided loyalties, but they meet here in united loyalty to a united cause which the unfolding years have made it easier to see.

All of. them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now….

* * *

That is why Lincoln—commander of a people as well as of an army—asked that his battle end “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

To the hurt of those who came after him, Lincoln’s plea was long denied. A generation passed before the new unity became accepted fact.

In later years new needs arose. And with them new tasks, worldwide in their perplexities, their bitterness and their modes of strife. Here in our land we give thanks that, avoiding war, we seek our ends through the peaceful processes of popular government under the Constitution.

We are near to winning this battle. In its winning and through the years may we live by the wisdom and the humanity of the heart of Abraham Lincoln.

_________

See also “Lehrman on Churchill and Lincoln.”