A Certain Idea of America, page 15
Grant, who at forty-two was sixteen years Lee’s junior, arrived a picture of dishevelment—slouched hat, common soldier’s blouse, mud-splashed boots. He was painfully aware of how he looked and feared Lee would think him deliberately discourteous, Mr. Chernow writes. Later, historians would think he was making a political statement, but he’d simply outrun his supply lines: His dress uniform was in a trunk on a wagon somewhere.
But he projected authority. Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, wrote that he saw Grant trot by, “sitting his saddle with the ease of a born master…. He seemed greater than I had ever seen him,—a look as of another world around him.”
The armies of the North and South, in blue and gray, were massed uneasily beyond the house. Neither Lee nor Grant wanted them to resume the fight. Some of Lee’s officers had urged him not to surrender but to disband his army and let his men scatter to the hills and commence a guerrilla war. Lee had refused. The entire country would devolve into “lawless bands in every part,” he wrote, and “a state of society would ensue from which it would take the country years to recover.”
The generals sat in McLean’s parlor and attempted conversation. But of course it is the surrender agreement, on whose terms they quickly settled, that will be remembered forever. Lee’s army would surrender and receive parole; weapons and supplies would be turned over as captured property. Officers would be allowed to keep their personal sidearms.
Lee suggested Confederate soldiers be allowed to take home a horse or mule for “planting a spring crop,” Mr. Guelzo writes. Grant agreed, and Lee was overcome with relief. Lee then asked Grant for food for his troops. They had been living for ten days on parched corn. Grant agreed again and asked how many rations were needed. “About 25,000,” Lee said. Grant’s commissary chief later asked, “Were such terms ever before given by a conqueror to a defeated foe?”
Grant asked his aide Ely Parker, an American Indian of the Seneca tribe, to make a fair copy of the surrender agreement. When Lee ventured, “I am glad to see one real American here,” Parker memorably replied, “We are all Americans.”
Grant would write in his memoirs, “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know.” His own feelings, which had earlier been jubilant, were now “sad and depressed.” He couldn’t rejoice at the downfall of a foe that had “suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Now the door to the parlor was opened, and Grant’s officers were introduced to Lee, including “a newly minted captain, Robert Todd Lincoln, the twenty-one-year-old son of the president,” Mr. Guelzo writes.
Grant and Lee shook hands; Lee stepped onto the porch and signaled his orderly for his horse. An Illinois cavalry officer, George Forsyth, remembered that every Union officer on the porch “sprang to his feet…every hand…raised in military salute.”
Lee looked to the east, where his army was in its last encampment. As he turned to leave, Grant came out to the steps and saluted him by raising his hat. Lee reciprocated and rode off slowly to break the news to the men he’d commanded. Mr. Guelzo: “He spoke briefly and simply, as to a theater company after its last curtain.”
They had done their duty, Lee said: “Leave the result to God. Go to your homes and resume your occupations. Obey the laws and become as good citizens as you were soldiers.”
Grant had something Lee didn’t have. Lee couldn’t act under instructions of his government because it had effectively collapsed when Richmond fell. Events had moved too quickly for Grant to receive specific instruction from Washington, but he knew the president’s mind. In the last year of the war he and Lincoln had become good friends, and in their conversations Grant had been struck by the president’s “generous and kindly spirit toward the Southern people” and the absence of any “revengeful disposition.”
Days before the surrender Lincoln had visited Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia. The president spent a day at a field hospital, where in “a tender spirit of reconciliation” he “shook hands with wounded confederates,” in Mr. Chernow’s words. A Northern colonel who described Lincoln as “the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on,” with an “expression of plebeian vulgarity in his face,” spoke with him and found “a very honest and kindly man” who was “highly intellectual.”
The mercy shown at Appomattox is a kind of golden moment in American history, but history’s barrage didn’t stop. America exploded with excitement at the end of the war, and all Washington was lit with lights, flags, bunting.
On Good Friday, April 14, Lincoln met with his son Robert to hear of what he saw at Appomattox, and then with his cabinet, including General Grant, where he happily backed up Grant’s generosity. Grant, he said, had operated fully within his wishes.
Lincoln was assassinated that night, died Saturday morning, and for a long time the next day would be called “black Easter.”
But what is the meaning of Appomattox? What explains the wisdom and mercy shown? How does a nation do that, produce it?
As you see these past weeks, I have been back to my history books. You learn a lot that way, not only about the country and the world and “man,” but even yourself. Would you have let your enemy go home in dignity, with the horses and guns? And not bring the law down on their heads? And the answer—what does that tell you about you?
THINK LIKE AN ARTIST
April 12, 2018
Speaker Paul Ryan’s announced departure, and the unprecedented number of congressional Republicans choosing not to run this November, has me thinking, again, of where the GOP is.
Its primary problem is that it doesn’t know what it stands for. It doesn’t know what it is. It is philosophically and ideologically riven, almost shattered, and the one piece that still coheres, represented in the House by the Freedom Caucus, is least reflective of the broader base, and the country.
Senators and representatives still have not reckoned with the shock of 2016. They’re repeating what’s been said and following an old playbook. They remind me of what Talleyrand is supposed to have said of the Bourbons, that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Some know an old order has been swept away, but what will replace it is not fully formed, so they’re not placing bets.
It isn’t all about Donald Trump. Mr. Trump came from the chaos, he didn’t cause it. He just makes it worse each day by adding his own special incoherence. The party’s intellectual disarray both preceded and produced him. He happened after twenty years of carelessness and the rise of the enraged intersectional left. He was the magic pony who was not like the other Republicans. But he can’t capitalize on this moment—he can’t help what is formless to find form—because he’s not a serious man.
Republicans will have to figure it out on their own. After they lose the House, they will have time!
Here’s what they should do: They should start to think not like economists but like artists.
Often when I speak, people ask, at the end, about Ronald Reagan. I often say what I’ve written, that a key to understanding him was that he saw himself in the first forty years of his life—the years in which you become yourself—as an artist. As a young man he wrote short stories, drew, was attracted to plays, acted in college, went into radio, and then became a professional actor. He came to maturity in Hollywood, a town of craftsmen and artists. He fully identified with them.
The thing about artists is that they try to see the real shape of things. They don’t get lost in factoids and facets of problems, they try to see the thing whole. They try to capture reality. They’re creative, intuitive; they make leaps, study human nature. It has been said that a great leader has more in common with an artist than with an economist, and it’s true.
The GOP needs artists.
If an artist of Reagan’s era were looking around America in 2018, what would she or he see? Marvels, miracles, and wonders. A church the other day noted on Twitter that all of us now download data from a cloud onto tablets, like Moses.
But think what would startle the artist unhappily. She or he would see broad swaths of the American middle and working class addicted and lethargic. A Reagan-era person would think, But they are the backbone! They built our roads, fought our wars, worked on the assembly line making the cars that transformed our lives. Reagan came from those people but a step below. His father wasn’t a factory worker with a union card but a somewhat itinerant shoe store salesman who was an alcoholic. Reagan’s family was not fully stable, but America was, and he could rise within it. He became not only a union member but a union president.
He believed passionately in—he defended and advanced—the free-market system. Freedom, he well knew, yields unequal results. Jack Warner had a grand estate and the day workers at Warner Bros. shared a walk-up on Sunset and slept in shifts. But that’s no cause for bitterness as long as the day workers know they can rise—and the system allows them to rise.
Today something seems stuck. Free trade, global trade—yes! But you can’t invest totally in abstractions because life is not abstract. People need jobs, men especially, and a nation that can’t make things is too vulnerable in the world.
A Reagan-era artist would be shocked by our culture, by its knuckle-dragging nihilism. She or he might note that constantly telling our children that the deck is stacked against them, even when that message is sent in the name of equality and justice, may leave them demoralized, driven not by hunger and joy but by unearned bitterness. The artist would be shocked that “the American dream” has been transmuted from something aspirational and lighted by an egalitarian spirit to something weirdly flat—a house, a car, possessions—and weirdly abstract.
In foreign affairs the people of that era knew why they were anticommunist. It was not only a totalitarian system that was by its nature brutal and a killer of freedoms; it was expansionist (even to Cuba, ninety miles from our shore) and atheistic. Wherever it went the churches were closed and the religious hounded. So: Resist communism! But you go forward accepting the simple tragedy at the heart of life, that this isn’t Heaven, it’s earth, and man is crooked timber. You wouldn’t invade the Warsaw Pact countries even though they’ve been turned into outposts of evil.
What might an artist see as the major need and priority for America right now? Keep this country together. Keep it up and operating and give it a sense of peace with itself. The crisis is our increasing disunity, and the thinning of a shared sense of the national dream.
What should the GOP be thinking of now, as a political priority? Be more human. Show a felt sympathy for those trying to rise. Align yourself with the culturally disheartened. Be on the side—as the party was since its inception, and now seems not to be—of Main Street, not Wall Street. Take a new and honest look at impediments to the American dream. Figure out why people don’t feel so upwardly mobile anymore. Be for populism without the bitterness, and patriotism minus mindless nationalism. And show respect—more than that, protectiveness—toward the economic system that made America rich. Republicans always think everyone favors economic freedom. But an entire generation has risen since the crash of 2008. They’ve never even heard a defense of capitalism. They’ve never heard anyone speak well of it.
And think twice about your saviors. Those NeverTrump folks trying to take back authority within the party—having apparently decided recently not to start a third one—are the very people who made the current mess. They bought into open-borders ideology. They cooked up Iraq. They allied with big donors. They invented Sarah Palin, who as much as anyone ushered in the age of Trump. They detached the Republican Party from the people.
Republicans now should be trying to see the big picture and the true shape of things.
Don’t see your country through your ideological imaginings, see your country as it is. Recognize reality, respect it, and see what you can do with it, with an eye to trying to persuade. Bend when needed. Define and then defend essential principles. Say what you stand for and stand there proudly. See and speak clearly. Be an artist, not an economist.
OUT OF THE ASHES OF NOTRE DAME
April 18, 2019
A few small observations on the fire at Notre Dame:
It’s interesting where your thoughts go as you watch a disaster, live. Friends kept saying they were feeling some of what they’d felt on 9/11, and this was true of me, too. No one thought it the same, but the flames and smoke evoked similar feelings of grief and loss, and a sense of portent, especially for Catholics, who saw in the destruction a metaphor for—or a judgment of—the state of their church.
Monday evening I found myself remembering an intuition I’d had hours after the World Trade Center had fallen. TV was showing people who’d escaped the towers, covered in dust and ash, and trekking north. As I watched I thought, Some desperate person among them is escaping his life right now, planning his disappearance. He knows the scale of the disaster because he just walked out of it. He knows if he doesn’t check in for the next few days he’ll be counted among the dead. He’ll soon be at a motel in Queens, then on a plane somewhere. He will tell his story decades from now. He’ll tell us he came back once and visited the memorial on which his name is etched.
I had an intuition too as I watched Notre Dame burn. Somebody wonderful is watching at this moment and having a conversion experience. He will write of how the size of his grief, of his shock, opened a door in his head and heart and his faith came rushing in. We’ll hear about that in coming years, and maybe from more than one person. Destroyed beauty is a spiritual event.
I also thought of the great speech in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, on all that was lost when the great library of Alexandria, Egypt, burned down. Thomasina, a young would-be scholar, says, “Can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library!…How can we sleep for grief?”
Septimus, her tutor, answers: “By counting our stock.” Don’t grieve, he says: “We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march…. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language…. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”
Those were Monday’s thoughts. Then, Tuesday morning, the shocking good news: The fire was out, the structure still standing, the great things still there—the radiant cross, the altar, the Pietà, the pews, the relics saved.
It felt like a miracle, didn’t it? I think it was.
I called my friend Liz Lev, the art historian and author of the magisterial How Catholic Art Saved the Faith, and asked her why the fire at Notre Dame was such a grave and emotional experience for so many people of varying faiths, not only Catholics seeing a cathedral burn.
Her answer was arresting. She said, essentially, that we are all of us more loyal to the idea of beauty than we mean to be or know we are.
“When the fire came, for two days it made us let our guard down,” she said. “It showed us that beauty still affects people, that they know they are custodians of it. We still need to believe in the beautiful.”
We sense the achievement and sacrifice that went to its making. “It’s not the tower in Dubai, which is clever, or even the Eiffel Tower”; it is “a spiritual home.” “There’s something in the building. You get the sense of centuries of people who worked on it who’d never live to see it done.”
The architecture is part of the story. “The Gothic is a paradox. It’s so lacey, it looks so fragile—the fire coming out of the lacey spire—and yet underneath you see this powerful, solid, domed facade.” This reverberates with the myths and stories we love: “The hero is strong and yet the hero is vulnerable, frail. This moves us.”
What does the art inside the cathedral, the statues and paintings, mean? Ms. Lev noted that Notre Dame’s story is the structure more than the art inside it, and in this it is the antithesis of the Sistine Chapel, where it’s all about the interior art and decorations. But the cathedral is also about “the scattered world of France’s relationship with its faith.” During the French Revolution the exterior statues were beheaded, glass broken, the church defaced: “They put the Goddess of Reason in there.”
“Notre Dame is a shoe box of memories” of all the times French Catholics “have gone running from the church.” Tuesday morning Ms. Lev learned that the statue of Notre-Dame de Paris had survived. “The statue is the same age of the consecration of the Cathedral. It’s not splendid, it’s nice, it’s pretty, but it stands by the altar and you always see people saying the rosary beneath it.” Sometimes, they are shooed away. “But she’s still there. That’s very beautiful.”
A great deal was made about the saving of the relics—Christ’s crown of thorns, a nail from his crucifixion, a tunic worn by Saint Louis. I asked Ms. Lev about the Catholic preoccupation with the physicality of things. Why do we pay such attention to relics in general?
“The Christian faith is rooted in the physical world. It is incarnational.” God took bodily form. “Christian art is Christian art because Jesus became a baby who could be held, and passed from person to person—‘You hold him now.’ His passion is a wet, messy, brutal affair on his body—he bled, he sweated…. We are creatures of flesh. He became flesh so we could become even more beautiful, even more like unto God.”
