'From a Soldier's Perspective'

“Brave though the Soldier, grave his plea–

Catching the light in the future’s skies,

Instinct disowns each darkening prophecy:

Faith in America never dies;

Heaven shall the end ordained fulfill,

We march with Providence cheery still.”

Herman Melville’s gracious “Lee in the Capitol (April, 1866)” is the great poem of the Civil War, urging not revenge but reconciliation. He included it in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in 1866 by Harper and Brothers, the New York house that had published Moby-Dick fifteen years earlier.

On Feb. 18, 1866, nearly a year after the Confederate surrender, Gen. Robert E. Lee testified before the Joint Sub-Committee on Reconstruction. The committee convened to resolve antagonisms between the Radical Republicans in Congress and President Andrew Johnson over how reconstruction was to be carried out. Melville’s poem is extraordinary, in part, because he was a strong Union supporter during the war. In it, he sympathetically projects himself into the voice of the great Confederate general and implicitly urges reconciliation. In the prose “Supplement” appended to Battle-Pieces, Melville urges the Radical Republicans to practice “prudence, not unaligned with entire magnanimity,” and writes: “Benevolence and policy—Christianity and Machiavelli—dissuade from penal severities toward the subdued.”

Melville crafts a fictional speech for Lee, in which the retired general holds both sides responsible for the war; the politicians (“intermeddlers”) in particular:

“I know your partial thoughts do press

Solely on us for war’s unhappy stress;

But weigh--consider--look at all,

And broad anathema you'll recall.

The censor's charge I'll not repeat,

The meddlers kindled the war’s white heat--

Vain intermeddlers and malign,

Both of the palm and of the pine…”

The passage quoted at the top is spoken by Melville’s narrator in sympathetic counterpoint to Lee’s dignified witness. I thought of the poem again while reading Philip Terzian’s column on the vulgarity, self-righteousness and incivility churned up by John McCain’s death. Partisans on all sides, not surprisingly, behaved badly, without dignity, honor or gratitude for McCain’s service to his country. Specifically, Terzian notes McCain’s gestures of reconciliation toward the North Vietnamese, who had held him as a prisoner of war for five and a half years. Terzian writes:   

“If anyone in public life was entitled to bear the memory of his captivity like an open wound and practice ill-will toward the People’s Republic of Vietnam, it would have been John McCain. And from my civilian’s perspective, it has never been entirely clear that the regime in Hanoi was worthy of the senator’s regard, much less forgiveness. But McCain surveyed the landscape from a soldier’s perspective, and saw the North Vietnamese in honorable, even empathetic, terms.”

Melville writes in his “Supplement”: “Patriotism is not baseness, neither is it inhumanity. The mourners who this summer bear flowers to the mounds of the Virginian and Georgian dead are, in their domestic bereavement and proud affection, as sacred in the eye of Heaven as are those who go with similar offerings of tender grief and love into the cemeteries of our Northern martyrs.”

My middle son is a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy and was part of the ceremonial guard on Sunday who lined the road leading to McCain’s burial place.