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Volume 43:

American Historical Documents: 1000 - 1904 (full text)

For better or worse, most of the Classics are no longer looked on as essential in the way they were when the Shelf was compiled. But if there is one volume whose contents should still be considered required reading for all educated Americans, it's this collection of American history. It begins with first-hand reports of the successive arrivals in the New World of the Vikings, Columbus, Vespucci, and Cabot. But the bulk of the volume tells the story of our country's founding, its expansion, and its survival through civil war. In keeping with the Shelf's unspoken policy towards history, this story is told entirely through primary documents. Here, then, are the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the first of the Federalist Papers.

Here, too are a number of treaties written in almost comically collegial tones. The 1783 Treaty with Great Britain ending the Revolution notes the wish of the two countries to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore. Just thirty years later, at the end of the War of 1812, the same two countries commit to restoring, upon principles of perfect reciprocity, peace, friendship, and good understanding between them. The Treaty with Mexico that gave Texas to the U.S. also expressed a sincere desire to put an end to the calamities of the war which unhappily exists between the two Republics, and to establish upon a solid basis relations of peace and friendship, which shall confer reciprocal benefits upon the citizens of both, and assure the concord, harmony, and mutual confidence wherein the two people should live, as good neighbours.

Taken together, these treaties -- along with others entered into with France and Spain and Russia -- document the fitful, piecemeal expansion of the United States, which has since come to seem so inevitable. They also paint a picture of war as a kind of gentleman's game, after which the opposing parties meet at halfcourt to shake hands. Which makes it all the more incredible to find, in the middle of this volume, Frank Aretas Haskell's Account of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Haskell served at Gettysburg as the aide-de-camp to General John Gibbon. He died in battle about a year later. In between, he wrote this letter to his brother, more than a hundred pages long, describing the battle. In this letter, there is not mistaking that war, even a just one, is more than a game:

All senses for the time are dead but the one of sight. The roar of the discharges and the yells of the enemy all pass unheeded; but the impassioned soul is all eyes, and sees all things, that the smoke does not hide. How madly the battery men are driving home the double charges of canister in those broad-mouthed Napoleons, whose fire seems almost to reach the enemy. How rapidly these long, blue-coated lines of infantry deliver their file fire down the slope.

But there is no faltering--the men stand nobly to their work. Men are dropping dead or wounded on all sides, by scores and by hundreds, and the poor mutilated creatures, some with an arm dangling, some with a leg broken by a bullet, are limping and crawling towards the rear. They make no sound of complaint or pain, but are as silent as if dumb and mute. A sublime heroism seems to pervade all, and the intuition that to lose that crest, all is lost. How our officers, in the work of cheering on and directing the men, are falling.

As this passage may suggest, the most remarkable of the many remarkable things about this letter, is the rhetorical heights to which it sometimes climbs:

Already, as I rode down from the heights, nature's mysterious loom was at work, joining and weaving on her ceaseless web the shells had broken there. Another spring shall green these trampled slopes, and flowers, planted by unseen hands, shall bloom upon these graves; another autumn and the yellow harvest shall ripen there--all not in less, but in higher perfection for this poured out blood. In another decade of years, in another century, or age, we hope that the Union, by the same means, may repose in a securer peace and bloom in a higher civilization. Then what matters it if lame Tradition glean on this field and hand down her garbled sheaf--if deft story with furtive fingers plait her ballad wreaths, deeds of her heroes here? or if stately history fill as she list her arbitrary tablet, the sounding record of this fight? Tradition, story, history--all will not efface the true, grand epic of Gettysburg.

Surrounded as it is by Lincoln's Inaugural Address on one side and his Gettysburg Address on the other, this letter suggests a great historical moment inspiring men to unusual levels of eloquence. Even more, it suggests a kind of pre-lapsarian time when the English language, even for politicians, had not yet been debased, when it could still be used not just to sell and to spin but to stir.


--CRB, November 12, 2007

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