For a nation that has fought a war every twenty years, the American Civil War was the bloodiest in our history. For both sides, it became a holy cause, a crusade of righteous service to conflicting ideals in the name of God in the heavens.
The song conjured up a "trumpet that shall never call retreat."
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
The chant in the North was "union, union" in the service of one nation. It later found expression as "indivisible, under God, and with liberty and justice for all."
Those words, written by the Socialist minister Francis Bellamy, are in our pledge of allegience, the promise that we make with hands on hearts. It's that pledge that makes Americans Americans. Bellamy had wanted the pledge to be used by all nations. (Today's self-styled far-right patriots have no idea that the pledge they recite with so much fervor was originally the work of a man of the left.)
For Americans, in that era, the idea of being UNITED was not just the name of an airline.
Today, as that savage war marks its 150th anniversary, publishers and television networks are hyping their civil war histories, even as another kind of civil war is underway. It's a partisan war, not between the blue and the gray of the 1860's but between blue states and red state in the 2011s.
The South has risen again politically winning disproportionate influence in the Congress and the media.
The "rebels" who get media attention these days are in the Tea Party, even if many are well off opponents of deeper chahe
Overseas, the rebels we are being taught to love are in Libya where a shadowy opposition aided and abetted by NATO bombing are all we hear about.
Unity is a value we embrace but spreading disunity is what we practice.
We fought two wars to keep countries from reuniting. We won on the Korean peninsular where North and South are kept divided partially by a phalanx of nuclear armed U.S. soldiers.
We lost the same battle in Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh's forces when the North and the South reunified by kicking US forces out. Millions of Asians died as well as over fifty thousand Americans.
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