The American Future by Simon Schama Read Free Book Online

on democracy were issued at regular intervals, so the official view went, the rest of the world would one day come around to the American way of life. Equally, though, Kyu-Chay’s hard-won knowledge was directed against the insularity of theocratic absolutism, a culture in which the obligation to annihilate dissent is extolled as high duty. Confronting that absolutism, he lost his life on a mountain track.
    As I walked back from Section 60 through the field of stones, something struck me about them that I ought to have noticed before. Almost every soldier’s headstone was inscribed on its reverse face with the name of a spouse: “Daisy His Wife, 1888–1941”; “Margaret Mayfield, 1911–1983”—although never, that I could find, “John Doe, Her Husband.” Occasionally, the names of children were inscribed on the same face, although the modest format and size prescribed in the modern era precluded much in the way of an inclusive family tomb on one stone. But children, sometimes painfully young, lie in proximity to the servicemen. For historians of military death and remembrance like Drew Faust, the need to reunite military families in death, starting in the Civil War, has been a peculiarly American habit. In other morewholeheartedly warrior empires and nations, in Prussia, or Japan, severance from family was often assumed, even taken as measure of martial devotion to the Fatherland. The camp and the barracks became family, military caste overrode the sentimental attachments of hearth and home, and the dynastic commander was supreme patriarch for whom the soldier would gladly offer up his life. In Victorian Britain, regiment was family, and the apprenticeship in separation for the officer classes began as early as possible with the boarding school. In more brutal conscript societies like imperial Russia, soldiering was an extension of servitude; the delivery of the unfree into a sacrificial bondage of unlimited term.
    But not in the United States, where, during much of the first half century of the nation’s life, a volunteer army was a negligible presence, hardly ever more than 10,000 for the rapidly expanding continental territory of the republic. At times of emergency like the anti-excise Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 or the War of 1812, the regular army was supplemented by the mobilization of state militia and a temporary increase in enlistments. But it was only during the Civil War that millions of men were torn from their homes, stores, and farms and pitched into the muddy marches and slaughter fields, remote from everything familiar. The scale of letter-writing home by soldiers with even a bare rudiment of literacy testifies to what was felt as the unnaturalness of martial exile, the craved assumption that the separation from loved ones would be temporary. “I want to see you and the children mity bad if the war don’t end vary soon I will come home on a furlow…,” wrote the farmer Hillory Shifflet to his wife from his camp in Tennessee in 1862. Each week, Shifflet received from Jemima back in rural Ohio not just letters, but cooked food and photographs, gloves and boots. In January of the same year George Tillotson, an enlisted man from New York, wrote to his wife: “You can’t imagine how much I would give to here from home and how much more I would give to see home…but then I suppose the satisfaction will be all the sweeter for waiting.” His homesickness was so great that though he didn’t want to “insinuate that I am sorry I enlisted…maybe like enough I would not enlist again to be candid I don’t think I would.” Tillotson was lucky enough to make it home again at the end of his muster. But hundreds of thousands were less fortunate. Which is why “Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” written by the Boston bandleader Patrick Gilmore in 1863 tocheer his disconsolate sister Annie at the very moment when it was