The Battle of Franklin was already over a month old when a local newspaper reprinted the following editorial 150 years ago this month. As the war entered its fifth calendar year were the people becoming brutalized, insensate; numb to the horrors of war? From a Seneca County, New York newspaper in January 1865:
“the prettiest fight of the war.”
THE AESTHETICS OF WAR. – The New York Tribune, yesterday, printed a glowing account of the battle at Franklin, Tennessee, and pronounced that bloody struggle “the prettiest fight of the war.” – We are certainly improving. A “pretty[“] battle is a novelty unheard of until our present civil war. Heretofore, the carnage and slaughter that attended a conflict filled the popular breast with sadness and mourning. Heaps of slain and piles of wounded and dying were always regarded as fearful and deplorable spectacles, no matter what triumphs might have crowned the banners of victor. But, now, we have changed all that. A battle which caused the destruction of thousands of lives, is called the prettiest fight of the war. After a while, if we continue progressing in this development of the esthetics of war, we shall see recorded in most jovial style, “a beautiful slaughter,” and “a love of carnage,” which will no doubt, soothe the pangs of those whose bleeding hearts are dending in sorrow and affliction over a son or brother slain. – Phil. Age.
Early yesterday evening I happened to open a book[1] to the page that contained the following paragraph. It seemed an appropriate coincidence for today’s post, given that it mentions the pageantry and grand style of war and given that it’s customary to look ahead but also to look back on the old year as a new one begins. Here’s part of Bruce Catton’s description of the Battle of the Wilderness, the first battle in the Overland Campaign in the merry month of May 1864:
In other battles these soldiers had known the fearful pageantry of war. There was none of that here, for this was the battle no man saw. There was only the clanging twilight and the heavy second growth and the enemies who could rarely be seen but who were always firing. There was no more war in the grand style, with things in it to hearten a man even as they killed him. This was all cramped and close and ugly, like a duel fought with knives in a cellar far underground.
“”Battle of the Wilderness Fighting in the woods The 6th Corps To the right of the Wilderness Tavern” (Library of Congress)
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100 years ago New York City celebrated a New Year’s that would have dumbfounded Peter Stuyvesant.
NY Times 1-1-1915
Happy New Year!
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- [1]Catton, Bruce A Stillness at Appomattox. New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1958. Print. page 93. original Doubleday edition, 1953.↩
