In a letter written in January 1861 to his nephew Thomas Jackson Arnold, then-VMI professor Thomas J. Jackson expressed his desire to avert war, but added a qualifier that Arnold found so disturbing that he later edited it out of his own reverent biography of Jackson. I am in favor of making a thorough trial for peace, wrote Jackson, and if we fail in this and the state is invaded to defend it with terrific resistance even to taking no prisoners. Taking no prisoners. That idea was well outside the mainstream of American and military thought at the time; no one in a position of power on either side was seriously considering a black flag war in the spring of 1861. Jackson went on to say that if the free states…should endeavor to subjugate us, and thus excite our slaves to servile insurrection in which our Families will be murdered without quarter or mercy, it becomes us to wage a war as will bring hostilities to a war as will bring hostilities to a speedy close. By that he meant making war so brutally expensive for both sides that they would quickly sue for peace. He meant instant, total war. What had driven the nation to the brink of war…was a bitter and often bloody, half-century clash over the question of the expansion of slavery…. All other political questions, such as those of states rights, protective tariffs and a national banking system, were subservient to this primal, paradigm-shattering, nation-defining question. The argument and eventually the war were thus about the future, not the past. They were about the failure, on a grand scale and drawn out over five decades, of Americans to agree on what to do with their westward-booming nations three prodigious land acquisitions -- the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the annexation of the Oregon Territory from Britain in 1846 and the Mexican Cession that followed the Mexican-American War in 1848. The moral and political debate entailed an inevitable calculus of power: whichever side, slave or free, added more states to its roster, the more its representational power grew, and with it the ability to determine the laws of the land. For the South, failure to add new states meant that its parochial interests would be slowly, surely choked to death. ~S. C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (Scribner, NY, NY, 2014) p. 19
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 16:04:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015