"We Should Grow Too Fond of It": Why We Love the Civil War

If war were not so terrible, Robert E. Lee observed as he watched the slaughter at Fredericksburg, "we should grow too fond of it." Lee's remark, uttered in the very midst of battle's horror and chaos, may be his most quoted—and misquoted—statement. His exact words are in some dispute, and it seems unlikely we shall ever be able to be certain of precisely what he said to James Longstreet on December 13, 1862. But in every rendition of the quotation, the contradiction between war's attraction and its horror remains at the heart. War is terrible and yet we love it; we need to witness the worst of its destruction in order not to love it even more. And both because and in spite of its terror, we must calibrate our feelings to ensure enough, but not too much, fondness. It is Lee's succinct, surprising, and almost poetic expression of a too often unacknowledged truth about war that has made this statement so quotable. Lee, the romantic hero of his own time and the marble man of ages that followed, displays here a complexity, an ambivalence, a capacity for irony that suggest cracks in the marble. His observation seems to reach beyond his era and its sensibilities into our own.¹

Lee was not alone among his contemporaries in articulating a fondness for war, though few had his sense of irony. Many Americans North and South looked forward to battle in 1861, anticipating a stage on which to perform deeds appropriate to a Romantic age but believing, too, that war would be salutary for both the nation and its citizens. Judah P. Benjamin, attorney general of the new Confederacy, reassured a New Orleans crowd in the winter of 1861 that war was far from an "unmixed evil," for it would "stimulate into active development the nobler impulses and more elevated sentiments which else had remained torpid in our souls." DeBow's Review anticipated from war "a sublime and awful beauty—a fearful and terrible loveliness—that atones in deeds of high enterprise and acts of heroic valor for the carnage, the desolation, the slaughter." Others were not so rash in their estimates of the likely balance between glory and horror yet nevertheless found in the coming of war welcome opportunity for self-definition and fulfillment. In the North, Henry Lee Higginson later looked back on his hopes for the conflict: "I always did long for some such war, and it came in the nick of time for me."²

Northerners and Southerners alike saw in imminent war the possibility for a cleansing corrective to the greed and corruption into which Americans had fallen. Historian Francis Parkman wrote to the Boston Advertiser that American society had been "cramped and vitiated" by "too exclusive a pursuit of material success," but he was certain that through war the nation would be "clarified and pure in a renewed and strengthened life." In a June 1861 editorial, the Richmond Enquirer rhapsodized that "a season of war . . . calls out new ideas and kindles new and more elevated emotions and sentiments. It appeals to all that is noble in the soul . . . it revives the slumbering emotions of patriotism, with all their generous joys. It restores the general brotherhood. It destroys selfishness. It begets the spirit of self sacrifice. It gives to sufferers a portion of that ecstasy which martyrs feel." The paper assured its readers that "many virtues will glow and brighten in . . . [war's] path, like fragrant flowers in the wilderness." But it would not be fragrant flowers that Virginians would soon be finding in the Wilderness.³