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By Root 1735 0

would be left for a much more ruthless society in a far more brutal age to try the actual experiment of genocide. All anyone actually meant was that to make human brotherhood a working reality in everyday life seemed too big a contract for frail human beings. The privilege of belonging to an admittedly superior race — the deep conviction that there actually were superior and inferior races — could not be wrenched out of human society without a revolutionary convulsion. The convulsion was unthinkable, yet it was beginning to take place, even though hardly anyone had consciously willed it; it was coming down the country roads with the swaggering destructive columns in weathered blue, lying across the landscape behind the haze of smoke that came down from the ridges around Gettysburg and Chattanooga, and there was no stopping it. The bugle that would never call retreat had been heard by people who had not previously been allowed to look upon themselves as persons possessing any rights which other people were bound to respect. To end slavery was to commit the nation permanently to an ideal that might prove humanly unattainable. The inner meaning of the war now was that everything which America had done before — its dreams and its hopes, its sacrifices and its hard-bought victories — was no more than prologue to a new struggle that would go on and on for generations, with a remote ideal lying dim but discernible beyond the dust of the coming years.

Here was the real revolution: here was the fundamental and astounding conclusion, which had been implicit in the first crash of the marsh guns around Fort Sumter, which had followed Old Glory and Palmetto Flag down so many streets amid so many gaily cheering crowds. Here was what was being bought by infinite suffering, tragedy, and loss. Here was the showdown, not to be understood at once, not to be accepted for generations, but nevertheless wholly inexorable. Mr. Lincoln was worried and Mr. Davis was desperate, and General Cleburne was quietly snubbed; and down the dusty roads came ten miles of Negroes, bags packed for a journey longer than any man could understand, marching toward a future that could never again be built in the image of the past.

… If people could not see it or say it, they could sing it. There was a tinny, jingling little song in the air that year across the North: a Tin Pan Alley ditty, mocking and jeering and pulsing somehow with a Ca Ira sort of revolutionary drumbeat. It spoke for the colored folk in a queer inverted way, although it had not yet reached them, and in a ten-cent manner it voiced what the year meant. It was called “The Year of Jubilo”:

Say Darkies has you seen old Massa

Wid de muffstache on his face

Go long de road sometime dis mornin’

Like he gwine to leave de place?

It went on, shrill and imperious, the song of the great overturn, the cheap little tune to which a great gate was beginning to turn painfully on creaking hinges:

De massa run, ha-ha!

De darkey stay, ho-ho!

I tink it must be Kingdom Coming

And de year ob Jubilo!

It would be that sort of year: year of Jubilo, year of overturn and disaster and ruin, year of infinite bloodshed and suffering, with the foundations of the great deep broken up; hard tramp of marching military feet, endless shuffle of splay-footed refugees running away from something they understood little better than they could understand what they were running toward; the significance of their march being that it led toward the unknown and that all America, like it or not, was going to follow.

2. Vote of Confidence

Beyond the war there would be peace. It was still a long way off, and a great many young men would have to die before it could become real, but Abraham Lincoln never took his eyes off it. For the peace would have to justify its cost, which was immense beyond calculation, and if the war was being fought to bring the Union together again, the Union would need to be rebuilt on something better than hatred and suspicion and a sullen longing for revenge. So in the