From time to time — as witness the set-to with neo-Confederates that we experienced a couple of years back after we editorially doubted the saintliness of Nathan Bedford Forrest — the Flyer finds itself immersed in controversies about the Civil War. Herewith the last word on the question from author James Dawes in The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. From the Civil War through World War II: “Union soldiers of all ranks, ethnicities,and levels of education were motivated to fight because they perceived secession as an unacceptable subversion of the hallowed idea that a generalized communicative consensus buttressed by a verbal artifact could achieve a force equivalent to the physical coercion that attacks monarchy.” Got that? Well, that ought to be the end of the matter.
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