July and War
Deep green summer trees make me think of honor and sacrifice
When June moves into July, summer’s full flower opens and covers us with its lush green and heat. I think few places embody mid-American summer more than the tree-covered humidity of its interior states, mostly east of the Mississippi. Perhaps that’s because I grew up in Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio, and I have many fond memories of southern Missouri just across the big river. In those places, one could viscerally feel the rich, saturating sunlight pouring growth over endless bean and cornfields, and the thick leafed copses and forests, filled with the raucous cries of cicadas and crickets, hinted at the impenetrable forest our land used to be.
Early July is also the time of the year when the battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863. Through thick humidity, butternut soldiers—as the historian Shelby Foote liked to call them in his classic account—from the south marched north, tenacious and largely shoeless on the dusty roads of Pennsylvania. In his famous historical fiction The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara describes them as “rebels and volunteers,” “mostly unpaid and usually self-equipped. It is an army of remarkable unity, fighting for disunion.” They came against “a polyglot mass of vastly dissimilar men, fighting for union.” The blue-clad volunteers—the last of its kind in the North, because the draft started shortly thereafter—were “fighting to set other men free,” as Colonel Chamberlain, near to becoming the hero of Little Round Top, put it to some disgruntled Maine men later in the book.
It is a strange contrast, countrymen bearing arms against each other in the name of freedom, for themselves and for others, bearing bodily violence to each other for liberation. Hitting and fighting and hurting and killing each other to assert independence. How can neighbors, people living and sharing the same land, ever be truly free, of themselves and especially of each other?
Even as I ask this question, I am thankful, and more than I can say, that so many of my forebears—genetic and otherwise—have felt the need to fight for independence. There are causes worth fighting for, and worth sacrificing blood and life. In a famous letter to his wife, parts of which are featured in the beautiful and tragic docuseries The Civil War, Major Sullivan Ballou from Rhode Island referenced this.
I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.
And what personal motive, beyond an historic understanding of the necessity of just war, motivated Ballou? “I have sought most closely and diligently, and often in my breast, for a wrong motive in this hazarding the happiness of those I loved, and I could not find one. A pure love of my country, and of the principles I have often advocated before the people, and ‘the name of honor, that I love more than I fear death,’ have called upon me, and I have obeyed.” Ballou is here quoting Julius Caesar, which shows his obvious classical education chops, and it also shows that honor is worth fighting for, and even dying for. Both Confederate and Union soldiers like Ballou fought for honor, which is a hard truth for us to understand. We can actually learn from and even respect men who valued honor, whether they were from Georgia or Ohio. And what is honor? Truth that is greater and nobler than men individually, springing from Christian virtues that deserve to be preserved far beyond single generations.
I can’t separate Civil War history, green July summers, and the meaning of America. Just as our nation’s independence stemmed from a sweltering Philadelphia congressional meeting of Declaration signers in 1776, so its continuance is bound up in our terrible internal strife four score and a handful of years later. Human history is littered with examples of men trying to establish homes and lands and freedom, and America is no different. Our history has some very sad portions. And it also has some magnificent and inspiring ones, even in the midst of the tragedy. That’s probably why July moves me. Its history is real, and important, and time keeps going, and leaves keep growing.
