In Camp.
We have fought a battle; we have been defeated. Roland has distinguished himself, and been promoted. I have to use all my influence to restrain his daring.
The coolness and deliberation of your grand-nephew Hermann are a great help to me.
The hardest thing in this war is, that thousands must necessarily be sacrificed in order to teach the officers the art of war. There is a deficiency of experienced and tried leaders; and it is no small thing that the army, wholly without any confidence in the military skill of its generals, maintains itself so bravely. They must learn how to fight by fighting; and in this particular the Southern States have the advantage.
I have very great doubts whether our opponents fight with the hope of triumph; I mean, whether they honestly believe, that if they conquer, their principle can be permanently established.
Their very bitterness, which exceeds all bounds of a common humanity, the very vindictiveness with which they carry on the contest, shows me that they believe in a victory by war, but not by peace. And here the question presents itself to me: Why must an acknowledged ideal principle always and forever be attained through blood?
This is the great enigma of history. But it is the same as it is in a smaller sphere and in individual life; humanity is rational, but its predominating characteristic is passion, impulsive affection, which urges forward and renovates the life of humanity as it does that of the individual. I am reminded of an expression of yours, that nothing is so conducive to the growth of vegetation as a thunder-storm. It is perhaps the same in the history of man and of humanity. Schiller's dream, that the highest form of poetry would be the peaceful idyl of an equilibrium of opposite forces without any great sacrifice, is but a dream. It is not found in the sphere of pure thought or poesy, because it is nowhere found in actual life.
As Goethe said, this America has no middle ages to conquer, but he was mistaken in saying that it had no basaltic strata, for it is now just coming out of its own peculiar condition of feudalism. Its history, like that of a dramatic poem, is condensed into a briefer period of time, and brought more directly under our view.
This America has been engaged in no war for dynasty or religion, and it must now fight for an idea. Independence was the first great question, and that may be also an egoistic question. The emancipation of others is the second and purely ideal one; and to be taken entirely out of the strife for wealth and material goods where external well-being is the sole interest, the final and supreme concern, and to be placed in a period of history where life must be imperilled for an idea, this gives ideal power. America now for the first time brings her new element, her sacrificial gift, into the Pantheon of humanity. Until now, it might be said that the historical greatness of America bore no comparison with its natural greatness.
America has had, compressed into a single epoch of existence, its migration of the nations, its crusades, and its thirty years' war; and there is something of the rapidity and the instantaneousness of the electric telegraph in its history.