The Dangers of an Alternative Reality

"We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt."

-Walter Scott

Still reeling over the Navy's murder of eleven people in a boat this week. "Murder" is the right word. We reserve the right to use lethal force to our government, but subject that privilege to law. A killing without lawful justification is murder. Definitely the right word.

That's all I have to say about that, to quote Forrest Gump.

Lately I've been chipping away a little at a time at The Demon of Unrest, now drawing to its climax as Fort Sumter runs out of supplies, Lincoln and Seward bungle the rescue expedition, and the treasonous South Carolinians amass some thirteen heavy batteries on either side of Charleston Harbor to shell a piece of United States government property.

Utter madness, all of it. In trying to come up with an explanation for how something so very awful could happen, a discretionary conflict that killed over 600,000 people, we tend to focus on political issues like the relationship between state and federal government, or the economic consequences of threatening the primary capital investment in the south--enslaved human beings--that was (who were, more accurately) worth more than all the factories and capital equipment in the north combined.

But politics or economics tend not to be enough. You need that secret sauce to nudge a man into picking up a weapon and killing another man.

Meet Sir Walter Scott.

I feel sort of bad for blaming a crippled Scottish novelist for the Civil War, but there you go.

Dead and buried nearly three decades before the war began, his romantic tales of knights and ladies depicted a society that was aped by wealthy southerners as our national crisis grew closer. Letters between them often included lines of Scott's poetry that you and I would never recognize, but any literate slaveowner knew by heart. Married gentility engaged in "flirtations" with each others' spouses. Mary Chestnut, the Civil War's most famous diarist, wrote in the days leading up Sumter about her flirtation with Joseph Manning, the former governor and considered at the time to be the handsomest man in the Palmetto State. It sounds like a lot of hanging around Mary's parlor while her husband, also addled on Scott, rode off to pretend to be a knight of the south, commanding troops based on qualifications that boasted zero military experience and a law degree. Manning's wife at one point wrote to Mary asking to formally commence a flirtation with Mr. Chestnut, who started giving Mary the cold shoulder upon observing that Manning showed up at the house most days right after the Colonel left to go inspect fortifications with Beauregard.

None other than Robert E. Lee was known at the time as not only the handsomest officer in the U.S. Army, but also an aggressive flirt while his wife stayed home, bound in a wheelchair by rheumatoid arthritis. Charming.

The men of Dixie drank deeply of Scott's depiction of knightly honor, taking the smallest thing as a slight. This often led to the invocation of the code duello, a formal dance between slighter, slightee, and their seconds, that often led to one blowing the other away in a duel or, if the genetic gods smiled on the dueling fields, the two of them blowing each other away before they could reproduce.

This whole chivalric fantasy world in which these people marinated gave them a foundation for hating and dehumanizing Yankees. No Boston woman descended from Roundheads understood or approved of the flirtation dance. Charles Sumner was shamed as a coward when he was beaten nearly to death on the floor of the Senate by Preston Brooks because he didn't fight back with more zeal--after all, so it was said, Brooks just tapped him with that cane as a matter of honor after Sumner had the temerity to give a speech condemning the Peculiar Institution, and started striking with more force out of exasperation that the weak-chinned Yankee wouldn't do the honorable thing and try to hit him back. Fun fact--Sumner was at a desk that was bolted to the floor while he was being whacked from behind by this Southern Gentleman, and literally pulled the legs of the desk out of the floor struggling to stand up. He never fully recovered from the beating.

So Scott's world of knights and ladies created a way to distinguish northerners as the "Other", and once you get there it's not a great leap to use violence against them to preserve your sacred way of life. Pretty soon you find yourself pulling the lanyard on a cannon pointed at your own countrymen, or maybe sending militias from right-minded states to invade the cities run by those dishonorable liberals.

As the call of a law school essay question would direct, "Discuss".