August 29, 2013

Finest Hour 106, Spring 2000

Page 23

By Winston Churchill

PRECIS OF THE CRISIS

THE two Churchills were alike in their appreciation for the heroism and sacrifice of the American Civil War. In The Crisis, Winston Churchill the American offers an epic tale of that war, showing the tragedy and the glory it brought to Federals and Confederates alike. He explained some of his feeling about the book in an afterword, which reads in part:

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“The author has chosen St. Louis for the principal scene of this story for many reasons. Grant and Sherman were living there before the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was an unknown lawyer in the neighboring state of Illinois. It has been one of the aims of this book to show the remarkable contrasts in the lives of these great men who came out of the West….St. Louis is the author’s birthplace, and his home—the home of those friends whom he has known from childhood and who have always treated him with unfaltering kindness. He begs they will believe him when he says that only such characters as he loves are reminiscent of those he has known there. The city has a population large enough to include all the types that are to be found in the middle West.”

The Crisis was in print at least through 1970, and I used to think it survived so long because people mistook it for English Winston’s The World Crisis. In fact, it is a historical novel that well deserves to stand on its own among other great works of its type. American Winston said his book spoke “of a time when feeling ran high. It has been necessary to put strong speech into the mouths of the characters. The breach that threatened our country’s existence is healed now. There is no side but Abraham Lincoln’s side. And this side, with all reverence and patriotism, the author has tried to take. Yet Abraham Lincoln loved the South as well as the North.”

Here then is another interesting convergence between the two Churchills: each shared a belief in the nobility of those who fought, both the Blue and the Grey, and in the unifying genius of Abraham Lincoln. To demonstrate Lincoln’s love for the South as well as the North, Winston Churchill the American ends The Crisis with the closing words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address:

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Those indelible words were also quoted, in other contexts but with equal fervor, by Winston Churchill the Englishman.