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Charles Francis Adams Jr, scion of two Presidents and himself a Union officer, researched secession after the war for his own curiosity and concluded that “both sides were right”- that the issue of secession was ambiguous. That the founders ratifying the Constitution did so while believing that their states retained the right to withdraw from that union. But that a few, including Washington, believed otherwise. It’s in an essay Adams delivered in 1902, “Shall Cromwell Have a Statue?”

Oliver Wendell Holmes was similar. Adams and Holmes both came from educated, well-off, anti-slavery backgrounds and served in the war. Afterwards, they were sick of all the moralistic abolitionist talk and wanted to put it all behind them. They felt closer to the soldiers on the other side that they'd fought against than to the preachers and crusaders behind the lines.

I searched the two names and came up with this:

Sentiment was out; reality was in. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., a Union veteran scarred by the war, angrily attributed the conflict and its bloody train to Harriet Beecher Stowe and “that female and sentimentalist portrayal . . . that the only difference between the Ethiopian and the Caucasian is epidermal.” White Americans would not make the same mistake again. They would not allow a cloying, feminine Christianity, tugging at the heartstrings to lure young men to their graves for a cause not grounded in reason. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. remarked that the war pushed him across “the threshold of reality.” The businessman, not the philosopher, now received Holmes‟s admiration. “Business,” he declared “often seems mean, and always challenges your power to idealize the brute fact – but it hardens the fibre and I think is more likely to make more of a man of one who turns it to success.” Philosophy will only get you killed.

Who can blame them? To dwell on a bloody war, the loss of comrades, the carnage of the battlefield, the stench of the hospital, and the hopelessness of the prison was to invite nightmares without end. Military doctors at the time reported soldiers who suffered from extreme “exhaustion” so severe that it was difficult to rouse them from sleep in the morning. They also noted “disordered actions of the heart,” a type of arrhythmia traumatized soldiers experienced after combat. When the soldiers returned home after the war, the symptoms persisted. The first professional paper diagnosing what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder appeared in 1876. Source

[Pelham]

Good find with the David Goldfield piece. I didn’t know that Holmes came to hold a view like Adams.

“They felt closer to the soldiers on the other side that they’d fought against than to the preachers and crusaders behind the lines.”

And this is visible in the reunions that the veterans of the CSA and the GAR held after the war. Old men who had once been on the same fields trying to slaughter each other, sharing memories.