"How Walter Scott Started the American Civil War" Topic

"A week ago this morning, I was standing in the magnificent library of Walter Scott's baronial home, Abbotsford. It's one of those early Victorian Gothic monstrocities, complete with moss-covered stone, a turret, battlements and a (now dry) moat, with a commanding view of the Tweed River. The library is an especially fine room with a magnificently carved wooden ceiling, imitating the stone tracery at the Chapel of Rosslyn which is now the northern most point of pilgrimage of all the DaVinci Code fanatics. And it struck me, looking at all the assembled Scott ephemera: This is the man who started the American Civil War!

No doubt you learned in grade school that it started at Fort Sumter and that slavery and states' rights had something to do with it. But no. The Civil War sprang with fully loaded double-barrels from the pages of Ivanhoe. No doubt about it. We have it on the best authority: Harper's in the decades right after the war.

I used to wonder: is there anything redeeming to be said about Walter Scott? All those gallant knights. The historical vision that is never, actually, very historic? The pride of homeland? The chauvinism? The longing for the golden past, lost in the industrial age? Walter Scott is a Romantic, of course. He was wildly popular. There were the intellectual Romantics, like Novalis, Tieck and the Schlegels, and then there is the Romantic of trivial sentimentality and muddled thinking: Sir Walter Scott…"
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Armand

Heh. Okay, maybe a little bit. Otoh, Lincoln allegedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, "so YOU are the little lady who started all this."

But the southern and northern imaginations were (and still are) quite different.

You can see Ivanhoe here, sure enough:

"It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim." —Intruder in the Dust

I think with all due respect to Mr Horton this is more than a bit of a stretch

Thanks

Armand

Pure racism! People are always blaming Scotsmen for starting fights! 😄

Ha!…

Armand

There is a Scottish proverb:
Twelve Highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion.