A pre-dad phase of life (not, I hasten to add, an announcement)

13 May, 2024

Dear Francis,

Natural law of the sort to which America's Founding Fathers appealed compels most men¹ in their 30s to develop a keen, almost single-minded focus on one of several historical wars. This is one step in the process by which the universe creates dads.

Although this force is ineluctable, like gravity, Nature's God has thankfully seen fit to provide men with a few choices. The traditional and official panoply consists of the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and sometimes, if you are given a special dispensation, the entirety of ancient Roman history.

Francis, I am not, I am learning, exempt from the laws of the universe.

A few months ago, on a whim, I picked up Gore Vidal's 1984 novel Lincoln. Having read the first few pages, I was faced with an intense awareness of my own historical ignorance. Although I had learned a bit about the Civil War in high school and college classes, and although I had, over the years, dipped my toes in internecine libertarian debates on the Constitutionality of secession, I quickly realized that I had little more than a surface-level understanding of the cataclysmic conflict that began in 1861. Aside from Lincoln himself, I knew little about the key players in the conflict—men like Salmon P. Chase, William Seward, Edwin Stanton, Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant. I could not have told you that pivotal battles were fought at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Petersburg.

In that moment, as I grappled with my lack of knowledge, there awoke in me an almost atavistic desire to immerse myself in every book I could find on the Civil War and Reconstruction. In short, I entered a pre-dad phase of life, like a caterpillar ensconcing itself in a cocoon and preparing to emerge as something entirely different.

And so, I have plunged headlong into books on that tempestuous period in American history. Currently, I am spelunking joyfully in Allen Guelzo's Fateful Lightening, which covers a bit of America's antebellum period, the entirety of the Civil War itself, and Reconstruction. Guelzo is a noted historian on Lincoln and the War, and I hope to read his most recent book, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment in due course.

In future epistles, I will regale you with some of my thoughts and observations on the Civil War and its applicability to our divided times—assuming you permit me to do so, of course. Perhaps you are deathly allergic to reading about war in general. Or maybe you know all there is to know about the Civil War, and would find my prattling on about it soporific.

I aim only to please, Francis.

Until next time, my friend.

SEW