Elderhostels (centrally directed from Boston) belong to the world of adult continuing education.  Elderhostelers have to be 55 or older. Normally they take three courses between their Sunday afternoon arrival and Friday afternoon departure. Each course lasts 7 1/2 hours (five sessions of 1 1/2 hours apiece). No certificates or credits are earned. There are also planned excursions, free time and periods of group entertainment. Sites include college campuses, state parks, retreat houses, monasteries and private homes (e.g. in Bramwell, West Virginia). My wife Mary and I budget a total of up to $800 whenever we go elderhosteling , including driving costs. This sum covers the courses, simple but pleasant lodging and good (sometimes superb) food.

Since May 1996 Mary and I have attended five Elderhostels, four being in the South. It can be hard to find a Southern Elderhostel  which does not have at least one of its three courses bearing directly on the American Civil War (1861-1865). Thus in our last four elderhostels we have studied:

That last Civil War course was offered by Professor Earl Hess of Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) in Harrogate, Tennessee, near the Cumberland Gap. The Elderhostel site was 20 minutes to the north, the Lodge at Pine Mountain State Park in Pineville,  Kentucky. That is a splendid mountain top location, with  attractive bedrooms, comfortable conference rooms and a hearty Southern buffet. 

Dr. Hess has published three books and twelve articles on the Civil War and makes a case for the virtual inevitability and therefore political wisdom of President Abraham Lincoln's decision not to allow the Union to dissolve.  First South Carolina, then ten other slave states seceded (peacefully, they expected) from the Union. Hess's thesis is that slavery was  the decisive issue behind the Civil War. The North
wanted to roll the later Kansas-Nebraska Act back to the 1821 settlement known as the Missouri Compromise. Slavery would be reluctantly tolerated where it already existed. But no further expansion westward was acceptable, especially to the new Republican Party. In a head on political collision, however, the South demanded that slavery  continue to expand in the West. I also understand Hess to argue that Lincoln's key decisions were the most moral, or merely the least bad, of the available choices. That is, Lincoln was right to insist on retaining eleven unwilling Southern States in the American Union. That war came and that 600,000 Americans died is also justified in Hess's mind by the later tacked on new Northern war aim of freeing four million slaves.

The two other Elderhostel courses we took at the same time also prompted us, informally, to inject thoughts about death and dying and morality into general questions about why North and South chose to fight. 

Our second course was by LMU's Professor David McDonald on how to live morally in an immoral world. 

The third course was by Professor Quinton Wacks on theories
and experiences of life after death. Wacks is also the longtime Elderhostel coordinator for Lincoln Memorial University. The three professors and a fourth (Dr. Charles Hubbard who has a new book which I skimmed on THE BURDEN OF CONFEDERATE DIPLOMACY) have worked together for years taking turns presenting a total of eight or ten different Elderhostel courses.

I grew up in the Deep South: Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Alabama. I knew and did not  like slavery's  omnipresent aftermath: segregated trolley cars, churches, cinema houses, rest rooms, whites-only drinking fountains, swimming pools and on and on.  In  high school in Shreveport I convinced myself that the agricultural barons of South Carolina were political fools to secede. If retain slavery they must, then their best option, their most reliable legal protection, lay  within the framework of the U.S. Constitution. Leave the United States and they could never be sure of the outcome. I always imagined that even in a successfully seceded Confederate
States of America (CSA) the innate decency of the dominant white Southern population would end slavery well before 1900. Had they remained in the Union, slave owners could have imitated practice of the British Empire in the 1830s and negotiated Federal monetary compensation for their lost chattel wealth. Take away Yankee nagging and finger pointing, I reasoned, and the South's moral consciousness would end slavery.

Nonetheless,  the land-rich South Carolina politicians were blinded by
their self-importance. They seceded without a by your leave and with no effort to do so constitutionally and respectfully. They "dissed" the Union.

My personal opinion is that a peaceful secession with another thirty years of slavery would have been evil, but  less evil than 600,000 deaths in war followed by Radical Reconstruction. In 1918 VIrginia's own Woodrow Wilson pushed his Fourteen Points for making peace with the Central Powers. Wilson underlined every person's right, every group's right to choose or create its own national sovereign to which to offer allegiance. What was good for Germany and Austria-Hungary was surely also "right" in hindsight for South Carolina and the Confederate States of America. Their motives for seceding were morally suspect. But they should nonetheless have been legally able to secede if they chose to.

I had long assumed that a peacefully seceded South would have continued  a peaceful neighbor of the much more powerful and dynamic remainder of  the United States of America. But Professors Hess and Hubbard cast doubt on that assumption. They produced  evidence from CSA Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens and others that influential CSA leaders were hell bent and determined in 1861 that the CSA  deliberately make itself the dominant power on the North American continent: playing a kind of cuckoo Prussia to  the
USA's Austria-Hungary. In that unrealistic scenario war would have come a year or five later. But come it would have, especially as the Mid-West would not endure a hostile, expansionist foreign power controlling  the lower Mississippi River and vital access to the port of New Orleans.

Lincoln observed that both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. But there were too many political dunderheads around and too little dedication to continental peace as a value at least as high as enforced national unity. And so there came civil war: on the debit side more American deaths by far than in any other war, on the profits side national unity preserved, slaves freed and some other good things. 

As I grow older, however, l lean more and more toward Benjamin Franklin's sentiment that nothing is rarer than a good war or a bad peace .
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for Asheville TRIBUNE