To paraphrase Shelby Foote: Before the Civil War many Americans said “The United States are …”; after the war they said “The United States is. It’s been well-documented how when the war started many Southerners had to choose between their state or the United States. It’s been almost three years since Winfield Scott chose his nation, but given the ever greater sufferings of Southerners, it probably seemed judicious for a Richmond newspaper to lambaste the old Virginian 150 years ago this week. The sense of betrayal to the state comes through as the newspaper fires up its readership.
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch November 10, 1863:
Gen. Scott.
A “personal admirer” of Gen. Scott, connected with the New York Times gives the following in an account of a visit to that distinguished personage:
“On the subject of the war the General is reticent. It gives him pain. To a question in regard to it he shook his head, replying, ‘That is a matter I do not talk upon; it is a subject for others to discuss, and not for me to dwell upon in my old age. It is in other hands, and must now engage the attention of other heads.'”
“sold himself to the enemies of his State and people”
We can easily conceive that the subject “gives him pain.” We are willing to suppose that this pain arises in some degree from other feelings besides personal disappointment. Gen. Scott must still have about him some of the ordinary feelings of human nature, and, if he has, we can easily understand why he broods in sombre silence over the great national iniquity in which, reluctantly, we hope, he has played so conspicuous a part. This man is a Virginian, and, if he can look upon the land in which he first drew breath, and which once so delighted to honor him, subjected to such woes and sufferings as she has borne for nearly three years, he must be not a man, but a monster. He has passed a great part of his life in the North, and he cannot but know the difference between the two people. Whatever the ribald hirelings of the Northern press may say of Virginia, General Scott knows, of his own personal observation, the pure and generous character of the Virginia people; the simple virtues of their agricultural firesides; the high tone of morality and personal honor, and of humble and unaffected Christianity which distinguish the great mass of her community. He knows, too, just as well the selfish, corrupt, licentious, godless traits of the Northern populace, and when he sees this herd of brutish beasts let loose to ravage and destroy the once powerful and happy plains and hillsides where he roved in childhood, the war may well give him pain. He cannot but love Virginia, not only for her people, but her past history. As a Virginian, he must be proud of the land which produced a Washington, and Marshall and Madison, and a host of other illustrious names which he was taught from his childhood to love and revere. Well may it give him pain to think of such soil desecrated by the vandal feet of mercenaries from every clime; its modest churches defaced with licentious and sacrilegious inscriptions; its hospitable dwellings burned to the ground, and the families which once delighted to entertain the stranger and give refuge to the distressed driven from their own homesteads and made wanderers on the face of the earth; its best blood flowing like water on a hundred battle-fields, and its very graves polluted by the infernal orgies of the fiends who have been let loose to work their will of demoniac hatred upon the living and the dead. If he can look upon such a scene without pain, he does not deserve the name of man.
Other considerations of a more selfish nature add, no doubt, to the “pain” which the war gives General Scott. When the war commenced he was the military idol of the whole American people. No soldier of the old United States Army occupied as proud a position. The laurels of the war of 1812, and of the war with Mexico, rested gracefully upon his massive brow. Other figures of those wars, perhaps not less deserving than himself, had faded away, but he towered upwards, a grand, living monument of the nation’s military glory. Virginia, his mother, had delighted to cover him with marks of her honor and love. Such he was then. But now! Called up to choose between honor and interest, between gratitude and selfishness, between duty and p[s]elf, he sold himself to the enemies of his State and people, and has lost all — lost his own good name, and lost the base price for which he sold it. To become Commander-in-Chief of the grand Yankee army, he sacrificed love and loyalty and every generous feeling of his nature, and in three months after he had done it he was thrown aside by the Yankees themselves, laid away upon the shelf as an antediluvian curiosity, consigned to a mausoleum of dead celebrities, where he is little regarded by the pressing crowd as the crumbling monument of the unfortunate Lawrence in Trinity churchyard. Instead of going down to his grave admired and honored all over the continent, he is execrated by the South as a traitor, and treated by the North as a dotard. Well may the war give him “pain.”
There is another reason besides for his sufferings. As a military man, he doubtless perceives the utter impracticability of accomplishing the objects for which the Federal Union has expended so much blood and treasure. He is himself on record as expressing the opinion that the South cannot be readily subjugated. Three years have set the seal of experience to the correctness of that opinion. Army after army has vanished away in the attempts. General after General has shared his own ignoble fate. McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, Rosecrans, Buell, and others, have followed him to a living grave. And still the military power of the South is not only unsubdued, but stronger and more defiant than ever.–Well may Gen. Scott be sorrowful and silent. Unhappy old man! He has outlived himself and his country, and is tottering onwards to a yawning tomb, where the most merciful epitaph that he can expect is–“Forgotten.”
