Mark Helprin Quotes
I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.
Helprin, Mark. Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto. HarperCollins, 2009, p. 18.
The early Union military leadership was so poor and timid that it was not clearly demonstrated that a Confederacy was not viable until later in the war, and the Southerners possessed an extraordinary capacity for ignoring reality and self-delusion, that it was not demonstrated until Grant’s major victories and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Southern East Coast that an independent South was not going to be.
This quotation is important because it is one of the few judgments and predictions Lincoln made that turned out to be very wrong. Even into the 21st century there are Americans with bad feelings and hostility about the Civil War.
Whether or Not the Democratic Speeches Against the manner in which the Union was conducting the Civil War was aiding the South of just fair political criticism has been debated since the war itself. This is one piece of evidence.
He was a realist who foresaw that even though the South had been militarily defeated, there were those who would persist in their efforts to retain slavery or a de facto form where freedom is the form but subjugation was the substance. It would be Jim Crowe and terrorism in the form of the KKK and a successor to Lincoln who was very sympathetic to the aims and culture of the Southern Rebels.
Lincoln and the Union leaders were still hopeful of ending the rebellion and getting things back to a pre-war footing economically. At this point they were trying to preserve components of the Southern Economy at no small cost. As that hope was shown to be futile, the Total War strategy of Grant and Sherman prevailed to the satisfaction of men like Opdycke. That actually ended the war quickly, but the Southern Economy was devastated in the process.
McClellan liked to parade and drill his troops but not fight them. Lincoln wanted him to take the offensive but he always found an excuse not to. Many historians believe that McClellan wanted the war to end, the South to rejoin the Union and be allowed to maintain slavery. Others feel that he was just a military man who maintained his popularity by minimizing casualties. Finally, Lincoln fired McLellan and the complexion of the war changed thereafter. McClellan ran against Lincoln for the Presidency in 1864. . See {633922}
He was not aware of it but the Union War Department had prepared well and additional ironclad ships under construction of which the Monitor was just the first. Lincoln had approved the construction of ironclads on October 4, 1861. The Confederate Merrimack was larger and to the layman was the stronger ship but the Monitor did some damage and drove the Confederate Merrimac from the field to make repairs. The Confederacy, with minimal industrial steel-making capacity could not produce enough steel to protect more ships than the one ironclad Merrimack. The Union Navy, not only were building more Monitor class ships, but also, had a few Merrimack type wooden ships being iron clad as well as their Monitors as Strong had called for. The Union soon totally dominated the seas and as important, the rivers with which they could supply Union troops and bombard Confederate cities built thereupon.
This is one of the best summaries of Lincoln’s early strategic thinking about the war. Unfortunately for him and the country, his generals were all trained in tactics rather than strategy. And the then modern world placed industry, logistics, and economics on a par with battlefield tactics. Until Generals Grant and Sherman were elevated to higher command, there were no military leaders who thought about the war in overall strategic terms. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman in a sense created the first strategic approach to modern warfare.
Bermuda was then a British possession. The major Lincoln foreign policy objective of the Civil War was to keep the British from assisting the Confederacy. Bermuda and the British people along the ocean trade routes to England lost a huge amount of business of in transit shipping of cotton from the South as the Union Naval Blockade of the South was very effective.
He had just assumed his post 6 days earlier. At this point he did not have enough knowledge to favor or oppose the regime change, but he did realize that the decision was a serious one and there would be no turning back. Diem was a creature of the Central Intelligence Agency. An anti-Communist Christian in a Buddhist county, the CIA engineered his rise to power, created his political party, provided him with cash to bribe other Vietnamese politicians, and paid for all the propaganda so he would “win” the Presidential elections. However, he abused the Buddhists, was thoroughly corrupt and ran a corrupt administration, but worst of all from the American point of view, he was unable to motivate the South Vietnamese population to fight the Communists. He reached the point where he was more of a liability, and the Central Intelligence Agency engineered a coup d’etat to remove him from power and replace him with a President more to our liking. (See {634540}.)
This quotation shows the idealism that drove many of the Union soldiers to complete the started but uncompleted vision of the founding fathers.
Lincoln used the very “estimate” to mean value or hold in esteem, a meaning which is no longer in use.
He was explaining his repudiation of General John Fremont’s military proclamation in Missouri confiscating rebel property and emancipating their slaves. See {633732} .
Mark Helprin is an American novelist, journalist, conservative commentator, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. While Helprin's fictional works straddle a number of disparate genres and styles, he has stated that he "belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend".
