Honor in the Civil War, Then and Now

John Kelly describes the Civil War as arising out of a failure “to compromise”; he also cautions against applying contemporary standards of ethics to historical events — “very very dangerous” — and contends that such application demonstrates “a lack of appreciation of history.” He is out and out wrong. All the way back to colonial times, numbers of Americans recognized the dignity inherent in every human being, and knew that such dignity needs to be protected, promoted, secured. The honorable course to take, then and now, was to fight for the rights of all human beings, black and white. In…