From guilt or loss of guilt, we tend to treat wars, in the past, as natural disasters: terrible, but somehow, beyond the control of anyone. It seems that you shake your grip on the fools who started the First World War and condemned millions with meaningless death. Historians teach us to say that the generals have made their best under impossible circumstances. The sad capabilities are the required passion, even when the crazy anger is more convenient. The efforts made in the escalation are delivered as weakness or cheese, while those who lead countries have been praised to a disaster for “the power of personality”, or to accept what was inevitable. We rarely honor those who return to the edge of the abyss. John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis is an exception, although only because caution and caution – was removed from nuclear missiles from Türkiye – was accurately covered and presented as courage and courage: we made the Russians “flashing”.
Usually describing the war with the metaphors of natural disasters, old, written by war. Homerus himself uses natural metaphors to prove the violent human actors: Achilles is a huge fire that was swept through the Trojan Plain. Looking at what the Greek war actually involved – battles of close fighting, where victory meant the cutting of others to death with edge weapons – the number seems to be lower than the mask.
This is with us. The civil war remains in the memory as brutal, compassionate, but also heroic and tragic, accompanied by a report of Cambalachian. It is the altar of American presence – a sublime sacrifice and a permanently disputed example – perfectly wiping out that the question about whether it may have been avoided through almost obscene pragmatic settlement. No war, no Lincoln, no liberalization declaration, no Gettysburg – neither the battle nor the title – to inspire us and direct us? However, three quarters of one million people died, and the worshipers who fought the war in a terrorist state appeared. Was it worth it?
In “Grand Center”, Jay Wink – the author of many beautiful works about American history – delivers this question about whether the civil war has been avoided. The title is a little exaggerated. Anywhere in the book, we are really facing a truly reasonable concession that may avoid conflict. What Winik offers instead is a picture of two sides talking behind each other, not with each other. However, he follows the efforts of those who really wanted to prevent war and shocking separation – and explains how Ibrahim Lincoln initially tried to listen and then finally rejected him.
Early seasons of what will be, for many, are given a familiar story. We hear again how a lip-looking background lawyer who has a little experience (one term in Congress and two failed Senate’s runs)-thanks to being mild external, and usefully; A man from the border instead of Boston or New York-to nominate Republicans from William Henry Siuri, who is apparently inevitable, and continues to win the national elections against the democratic supportive of slavery John Beckenridge.
We were told about the assassination plans that brewed before Lincoln took office, forcing him-on a wide range as a comic, and not the cowardly saying-to infiltrate Washington under the protection of the newly established Penkercone. (Through rumors, although it was not in reality, he was wearing women’s clothes.) The southern states were already going to separate decisions one by one, as South Carolina took the initiative. Meanwhile, the Confederate Gunner rope tightened around Fort Sumter, in the water off Charleston, where the northern garrison was actually under the siege.
The reasons for the radical work were clear. Lincoln, despite his efforts to present himself as moderate, what we now call one candidate. The slavery issue, and his factional rejection of it. “If slavery was not wrong, nothing wrong,” was the most affirmative like this issue, along with the famous pilgrimage: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I think this government cannot bear half and half slaves.”
Although Lincoln was not the absolute about the moral question, it was not the abolition of strict political punishment, we may want to be or defenders of slavery had made some subsequent commentators seem. Instead, it was a democratic politician trying to build an alliance – and he knew that, to preserve the border states within it, the line of cancellation of the death penalty in New England may succeed, while the focus on containing slavery, and not eliminating it may succeed.
Thus, during this American internal break between the elections and the inauguration – it was longer in the nineteenth century, with the ceremony held in March – Lincoln struggled to find a common ground with the southern secession. Before the Monday’s exchange of messages with Alexander Stevens, from Georgia, a friend of his days in Congress explained that in the southern mind, everything was secondary to preserve slavery. “We in the south believe that African slavery, as it is with us, is both moral and political.” “This opinion was based on inferiority in the black race. However, perhaps the majority of the north, you think it is wrong. Acknowledging the difference.”
The Foundation to avoid war is probably governed from the beginning. However-here lies in the new focus on the Wink-Wink-there was an attempt in a “conference of peace” (Wink benefits from it strangely throughout this period before the garment, and it was more important than what most of the subsequent history confessed.
The conference was held in Washington, at the Williad Hotel, where Lincoln has remained since its arrival, using his wing as his office. Williad, like Waldorf-CTORIA, in New York, has passed by many embodiment, but in the nineteenth century, it seemed more central to Washington’s life than the White House or Capitol that has not been detailed for a long time. (The dome of the cast iron was still incomplete.) From February 4 to 27, the conference made a delegate from the thirty -four countries in the Union. I have gathered representatives from the south – especially from Virginia, the cradle of the presidents, who have not yet adhered to separation – with Republicans from the north, and as many of them reveal, as Winnik reveals, under the direct or indirect guidance of Seward. Although the delegates were often former members of Congress, the gathering was not limited to them; Former President John Tyler, from Virginia, who has not held any official position but remained influential.
It was, with all indications, comfortable negotiations. Eat both sides – if the Williad list of that year is reliable – on the slices of the sheep and the cooked kidneys, innovative, the frozen custard, which, like baseball, will not become a national obsession even after the war. It may be less surprising, then, given their common table, class and morals, that both sides, including almost all Republicans, were ready to waive slavery in the south in exchange for ending the threat of separation. The thirteenth amendment was proposed, and it may have passed, which ensures the continued presence of slavery in the states that have already prevailed. Even Lincoln was ready to accept this.
The issue that could not be resolved was the extension of slavery in the regions. Here, the arguments were fierce, layer with sub -copies and more audible tones from now. Despite all that the tone and talk about the settlement – Lincoln went to the point of agreement that the fugitive slave could be restored and returned to slavery – the real conflict was deep, and in the end, uncovered. Like conflict in the Middle East today, it was rooted in the interests of engagement than the vast mutual fears that cannot be reconciled. The basic meanings were clear to all: Anyone who was placed on slavery, as southerners believed, was aimed at speeding up its extinction; Any constitutional blessing of slavery, as I understood the North, aims to support its extension.
To use an embarrassing, but appropriate, it was as if the right to life movement, after it won the presidency, was admitting that reproductive freedom would remain protected in blue states such as New York and Massachusetts, but it is completely eliminated in red cases, with harsh penalties. Voters in the blue state will see that the real goal is to end the abortion everywhere, and that the agreement even on the temporary truce means accepting the long -term influence of neighbors hostile to a specific and specific issue.
The southern delegates’ doubts were behind the seventh trauma after October: The John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry, in 1859, convinced the south that the black population was ready to rebound in a bloody rebellion if it was given the opportunity. This, when returning back, was clearly clear – the worshipers, in fact, had joined the Braun rebellion, and when the black separation came in the end, but shortly, during the reconstruction, the black Americans, away from rotating violently on their former masters, were enthusiastic policy. However, the southern institution was not shaken in its belief that any privilege to cancel the death penalty will end in the massacre of white families. Stevens wore an indignation to Lincoln of “madness exhibitions like John Brown is a raid in Virginia, who received a lot of sympathy from many, and not an open condemnation from any of the main men in the current dominant party.”
However, Lincoln was warmly participated in the discussion of the Peace Conference, and insisted that his mission was simply following the constitution, which he understood to prevent separation from the union as a betrayal. However, despite all his temporary concessions, he actually ended the conference by announcing it, “in choosing evil, the war may not always be the worst. I will still do everything in my capacity to avoid this, except for neglecting a constitutional duty. With regard to slavery, you must be satisfied with what it is. The voice of the civilized world against him.”
These words may now hit us as unjustified in an unjustified way, but behind them putting the doctrine of “Scorpio Bing” – the idea, which was adopted by the advocates of the fight against the world all over the world, that if it is possible to attend slavery and confined, it will destroy herself, as it is said to the scorpion to support himself to death in a ring of fire. Scorpio metaphor, despite the permeability, was chosen badly. Just as the frogs do not, in fact, in the water while boiling them but they jump when they are engraved, scorpions are actually immune to their poison, and when they surround fire, they do not die by the bite themselves but from the cramps caused by heat that seems to be respected only. This image provides a better metaphor for the next war. Pure suicide does not happen in nature. Self -destructive cavity has been meaningless.
However, the words of Lincoln – Claira, have been identified for anyone who fits with his tones, and everyone in this conference – that slavery should be placed or left in a position to end themselves. The slavery had a cursed past, and the present should be tolerated, but there is no future. No one said this completely. Everyone understood it. Thus, the Williad Peace Conference is quietly stumbled. Its decisions were rejected in the Senate and did not reach a vote in the House of Representatives.
South madness and northern satisfaction, at first glance, seem to be more characteristic of Williard’s meetings: that no person on the northern side has suggested a rational plan for gradual liberation and liberation, which is supposed to be supported by wealthy industrialists already in the north and bypassing the specified temporal separation. Such plans have been tried by-in Pennsylvania, early eighteen, and suggested to Verginia, although without success, by Thomas Jefferson. Certainly, a similar scheme, whatever its delay for the worshipers, may have survived the country with the full size of the next war. Lincoln himself returned to the idea in 1862, when he proposed a gradual cancellation program for border countries. However, until then, at the height of the war, representatives of the friendly border state refused to act. Slavery included itself deeply, not only as an economic engine but as a cultural organization linked to terrorism.
