The U.S. Civil War — An Appeal to a Forgetful Generation

10d (edited) • The Gentlemen's Path 🤵🏻‍♂️

If one wishes to speak honestly of war—gentleman to gentleman—one must first relinquish sentimentality. The American Civil War was not pageantry. It was not noble spectacle. It was a national catastrophe of such magnitude that its scale still resists moral comprehension.

Between 620,000 and 750,000 Americans perished. (US Civil War historians are now moving the number higher.) That is not a statistic—it is a demographic rupture. Roughly one in every forty Americans alive at the time died. Transposed onto the present day, this would mean eight million dead. No other American conflict approaches it. Not remotely. In fact, you can combine all other American war dead, and it still would not even approach the lives lost between 1861-1865.

Two-thirds of these men did not fall heroically beneath musket fire. They rotted from disease—dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia—often in camps more lethal than the battlefield. They died alone vomiting or defecating upon themselves…unlike the glamour of Hollywood films. Many were scarcely more than boys. The average soldier was barely past adolescence, some as young as fifteen. Youth marched in with ideals and returned—if they returned at all—maimed, haunted, or hollowed beyond recognition.

Over 60,000 amputations were performed! No antibiotics. Crude anesthesia – if any. A saw, speed, and prayer. Survival often depended not on courage, but on whether infection set in before nightfall. Men screamed until their voices gave out. Others bit leather or passed into shock. A gentleman’s bravery was not found in victory, but in endurance.

On September 17, 1862, at Antietam, 23,000 men fell in a single day—the bloodiest day in American history. Regiments were erased. Cornfields ran red. Bodies lay in lines so dense one could cross a field without touching earth. The Battle of Gettysburg, of which is often hailed with one of the greatest speeches given in the English language, incurred 51,000 causalities.

And yet—here is where restraint is required—this is not where the story ends.

A Sacred and Honoring Symbol

The Stars and Stripes does not stand for the violence that occurred beneath it. It stands for what endured despite that violence.

It flew over men who would never see their homes again.

It was stitched by hands that would later receive death notices.

It was carried into smoke by boys who did not yet understand fear—only duty.

The flag is not honored because war is glorious. It is honored because human beings bore the unbearable while refusing to let the republic collapse into oblivion.

To hold the flag honestly is to hold it over a grave, not a parade.

A gentleman does not worship the machinery of war. He reveres the moral cost paid by those who were summoned into it. He understands that the flag is not an emblem of domination, but a witness—silent, blood-stained, and enduring—to the truth that civilization is fragile, and that its preservation exacts terrible prices from the young, the faithful, and the obedient.

To this end, I would like to leave you with the aforesaid speech, one that you may recall from grade school, but as a discerning chap, it just may hit a different register now (in a mere 272 words).

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

- President Abraham Lincoln, 19 November 1863

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