Historical perspective helps. We live in polarized times. Impeachment speaks for itself. The edges are sharp — but not nearly so sharp as in the past.
I won’t even focus mainly on the Vietnam era, when polarization was expressed in body bags. Masses of them. More than 50,000 in 10 years, before American participation in the Vietnam War ended.
In Manhattan, where I was living in the late 1960s as the war raged, there were anti-war “mobilizations.” At the drop of an announcement, 100,000 or more people would materialize on a Saturday in downtown New York City to protest the war. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
No rhetoric today, caustic though it be, can match that. Today’s politicians scream and pontificate and preen, and yes, today’s issues are serious. But there is no correlation between them and your draft status. Remember, military service during the Vietnam War was obligatory, not voluntary. Millions of young Americans either went off to fight in Vietnam or tried to figure out how not to, honestly or dishonestly. Polarization was intensely personal.
Each life is infinite. Still, some 10 times as many Americans died in 10 years in Vietnam as in the 19 years since 9/11. And the Vietnam era was far from the worst period of polarization in America. The numbers of the Civil War dwarf those of the Vietnam war. It is not the numbers I focus on. It is the close-to-home Civil War chasms, infinitely more hostile than heated arguments today over Trump and Pelosi at a Thanksgiving dinner.
Check the home of the Civil War’s chief prosecutor, President Abraham Lincoln himself.
His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had seven close relatives in the Confederate Army. Here is the daily scene in the White House. Mrs. Lincoln is fully supportive of her husband, who is fully prosecuting the war. The aim is to defeat the South. That means, in Mrs. Lincoln’s case, to defeat a brother, three half brothers and three brothers-in-law. They all may die due to her husband’s efforts. Talk about agony in praying for success.
“Brother-in-law” is an abstraction. It means that the husbands of three sisters of Mrs. Lincoln fought to kill Union soldiers. What could possibly rip apart family bonds more than that? To describe this as “polarization” seems hopelessly anemic.
There were no “Thanksgiving dinners” to hash out the differences. Yet, Abraham Lincoln spoke of forgiveness and reconciliation. He was so far above anyone on the political scene today. We all know that his approach was not followed after his assassination, a error from which the country still suffers. Look what he could and did do while he was alive, as set down by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her Pulitzer-winning Team of Rivals.
In December, 1863, Lincoln invited his wife’s sister, Emilie Helm, to the White House. Her husband had been killed in Tennessee, fighting in the Confederate army, at the Battle of Chickamauga. He was the enemy. After his death, someone who saw Lincoln after he received news of Helm’s death, reported: “I never saw Mr. Lincoln more moved than when he heard that his young brother-in-law, Ben Hardin Helm, scarcely 32 years of age, had been killed. I saw how grief-stricken he was . . . so I closed the door and left him alone.”
Helm’s wife had reached her fatally wounded husband minutes too late. Whereupon, she desperately wanted to see her mother — who was on the Union side of the line. A Confederate general sought a special pass from Gen. Grant for Mrs. Helm. Request denied. So Helm’s father wrote to Mary Todd Lincoln’s stepmother. “Could you or one of your daughters write to Mrs. Lincoln and through her secure a pass?”
A mortal enemy is trying to pull strings to alleviate the pain of a young widow on the wrong side of the Union line. “Wrong side” is not just a political side, it is geography. Word got to Mrs. Lincoln, from which word got to Abe Lincoln. He personally issued a pass allowing his wife’s stepmother “to go south and bring her daughter . . . with her children, North to Kentucky.”
Goodwin:
“When Emilie [Helm] arrived at Fort Monroe, however, the officials demanded that she take the oath of allegiance to the United States. Unable to contemplate such a momentous step so soon after her husband’s death in the Confederate cause, she refused. The officials sent a telegram to the president, explaining the dilemma. They received a prompt directive: ‘Send her to me.’”
What kind of reunion could there be between sisters Mary and Emilie? Each had lost three brothers in the Confederate Army — Sam Todd at Shiloh, David Todd at Vicksburg, and little Alexander, Mary’s favorite baby brother, at Baton Rouge. Emilie had lost her husband. The Lincolns, meanwhile, had lost their son Willie to illness.
What could Mary Lincoln and Emilie Helm possibly say to one another?
Goodwin:
“That night, as Mary and Emilie dined alone, they carefully avoided mention of the war, which ‘comes between us,’ Emilie acknowledged, ‘like a barrier of granite closing our lips.’ They talked instead of old times and of old friends. Emilie marveled at Mary’s ‘fine tact,’ which allowed her to ‘so quickly turn a dangerous subject into other channels.’ In the days that followed, Mary did her utmost to deflect her sister’s mind from her sorrow.”
Mary shared her grief over her son Willie’s death. As her son’s spirit came over her, Mary said, sometimes their baby brother, dead at Baton Rouge, appeared, too. Willie from the North, Alexander from the South. The vision “seemed to promise a day when the Todd family would again be united,” as Goodwin put it.
Enter General Daniel Sickles. He and a friend came to call on Mrs. Lincoln while Emilie was in the White House. Mary could not restrain her emotions and let down her guard. She invited Emilie to join them. Sickles had lost a leg at Gettysburg, in severe pain, but Lincoln’s good cheer had helped restore his spirits. Now, Sickles and his friend, Sen. Ira Harris, could not “tolerate the presence of a traitor in the home of the commander in chief.”
Goodwin cites Emilie’s diary.
As Emilie entered the room, Senator Harris told her, “Well, we have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga and I hear, madam, that the scoundrels ran like scared rabbis.”
Emilie: “It was the example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.”
You can imagine what now became of this reunion. Goodwin writes:
Senator Harris turned on Mrs. Lincoln, asking why her son Robert had not joined the army. She offered an excuse, trying to cover her fear of losing another son. “I have only one son and he is fighting for his country,” Harris said. “And Madam,” he said, turning to sister Emilie, “if I had 20 sons they should all be fighting the rebels.”
“And if I had 20 sons,” Emilie coldly replied, “they should all be opposing yours.”
The two sisters fled the room and wept.
Despite the urgings of Mary and Abraham Lincoln, Emilie left the White House to return South.
And we call today’s times polarized?
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg may be reached at [email protected].
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