Just before he leaves to enlist in the Union Army, Shadrach Yale tells Jethro Creighton that he wishes the long-simmering tensions that led to the American Civil War hadn’t come to a boiling point just as he himself reached adulthood, since he had other plans for his life. Still, he chooses to serve, setting aside his own desires to work toward the greater good and showing how American democracy demands a balance between self-determination and the cooperation that maintaining a union among diverse interests demands. Unfettered self- interest would lead to anarchy, and the book explores the ways in which uncurbed individualism can become destructive through Guy Wortman, who oversteps community boundaries when his low opinion escalates into vandalism, or through the soldiers whose desertion endangers their comrades—and the broader war effort in the North.
The biggest example of this strife is, of course, the Civil War. Importantly, the value of self-determination animates both sides’ rationales for war. In the North, the abolitionists seek emancipation for enslaved people—granting them the same rights of self-determination as white citizens—in the South. Conversely, cousin Wilse (who lives in Kentucky) and brother Bill give voice to a Southern argument that states and regions also have the right to self-determination within the broader confines of the American nation. Both cite Southern claims that a national ban on slaveholding oversteps these rights. In Bill’s case, the idea of Southern self-determination ultimately aligns with the idea of individual self-determination when he follows his convictions into the Confederate Army. While his family members express their distress over his choice, they ultimately respect his right to hold and action on his convictions, and they defend that right even at the risk of property damage and personal injury. Thus, while Across Five Aprils celebrates self-determination when practiced by well-meaning individuals, it also explores the ways in which freedom can lead to strife and difficulty.
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Self-Determination Quotes in Across Five Aprils
Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was nor regarded highly, there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and not at all for drinking and rampaging about the county, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that […] He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which surely was a fool thing to do unless one as interested in “breakin’ up school.”
“Well, I’ll tell you: a half of the country has growed rich, favored by Providence, but still jealous and fearful that the other half is apt to find good fortune too. Face it, Uncle Matt; the North has become arrogant toward the South. The high-tariff industrialists would sooner hev the South starve than give an inch that might cost them a penny.
Then Ellen’s voice was heard, timid and a little tremulous; farm women didn’t enter often into man-talk of politics or national affairs.
“But what of the downtrodden people. Wilse? Ain’t slavery becomin’ more of a festern’ hurt each year? Don’t we hev to make a move against it?”
[…] Wilse brought his hand down sharply on the table. “What the South wants is the right to live as it sees fit to live without interference. And it kin live!”
“I don’t know if anybody ever ‘wins’ a war, Jeth […] a blaze kin destroy him that makes it and him that the fire was set to hurt” […]
“But the South started it, didn’t they, Bill?”
“The South and the North and the East and the West—we all started it. The old slavers of other days and the fact’ry owners of today that need high tariffs to help ’em git rich, and the cotton growers that need slave labor to help ’em git rich and the new territories and the wild talk […] I hate slavery, Jeth, but I hate another slavery of people workin’ their lives away in dirty fact’ries for a wage that kin scarse keep life in ‘em; I hate secession, but at the same time I can’t see how a whole region kin be able to live if their way of life is all of a sudden upset.”
“Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”
“I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty of fifty years of my life and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”
“Do you hev to do it then?”
“I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”
“If the editor of the county paper ain’t against freedom of speech, could I jest put one more question to this young ’un?” Without waiting for a reply, the man called Wortman turned again to Jethro. “What I want to ask you is this: is yore pa good and down on Bill? Does he teach you your brother is a skunk that deserves shootin’ for goin’ against his country?”
Jethro felt a great weakness. He had to steady himself against the counter for a second, and when he spoke the words were the first ones that occurred to him.
“My pa don’t teach me one way or the other. He knows that I think more of my brother than anybody else in the world—no matter where he is. And that’s all I’ve got to say to you.” He looked directly at the man with an anger that dissipated his weakness.
“There be things that’s evil in these woods tonight. I seed evil apassin’ my place a while ago, comin’ in from the shortcut road to town and reelin’ in the saddle. I heered evil braggin’ in the saloon today about layin’ fer a young ’un on his way home.” He reached over and took the reigns from Jethro’s hands. “I’d best drive till we’re out of the brush,” he added. We’re gittin’ close to the place where some piz’nous snake might strike quick.”
The world was turning upside down for Jethro. He felt as if he were someone else […]. When he tried to speak, he found that […] his lips worked as they had often seemed to work in a bad dream to form the words that he wanted to say, but no sound passed them, and there was nothing to do but sit quietly while his mind floundered in the uncertainties that beset it.
Jethro heard someone shout his father’s name and Bill’s and the word Copperheads.
Matt fumbled his way to the front door. “Show yore faces,” he called. “Come up and give me a chance to talk.”
There was only raucous, drunken laughter at his words. A bundle of something was thrown at the gate, and then the riders galloped on.
Jethro scrambled down the ladder and ran out into the yard. At the gate there was a bundle of switches tied together with a cord, the symbol adopted by local ruffians as a warning of punishment to follow. He tore off the paper that was attached to the cord and carried it inside to the table, where Ellen had lighted a lamp. On the paper in large printed letters was the message: “Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons.”
Has justice been done, gentlemen? Has an ailing man who commands the respect of those in this county who recognize integrity—has this man suffered enough to satisfy your patriotic zeal?
May I remind you that Tom Creighton died for the Union cause, that he died in battle, where a man fights his opponent face to face rather than striking and scuttling off into the darkness?
And just in passing, Gentlemen, what have you done lately for the Union cause? Of course you have burned a man’s property—barn, farm implements, hay, and grain; you have polluted his well with coal oil and terrified his family. Furthermore, you have done it quietly, under cover of darkness, never once asking to be recognized in order to receive the plaudits of the county at large. But, has any one of you faced a Confederate bullet? Well, Matt Creighton’s boy has.
There was, however, no reason why Hig Phillips should have avoided the draft except that he was a lazy bachelor […who] had been known to adhere to the opinion that fools could do the fighting while men of intelligence and property might take pleasure in the prospect of a long and easy life. He was not generally admired for these views, but that fact bothered him hardly at all […] until one moonless night a band of young men visited him—men who knew what gangrenous wounds were like, what marches through cold rain or blistering heat meant, while hunger gnawed at their stomachs or weakness from typhus or dysentery brought agony to every step; men who had seen the dead piled high on smoking battlefields and had come to believe that the soldier of two years had done his share, that the burden should now fall upon other shoulders.
That winter many people were talking of peace […]. A people pushed to the extremities that existed in the South could not possibly hold on […]. But they did hold on, and as the war trailed drearily on, vindictiveness toward the stubborn stand of the seceding states grew steadily more bitter in the North. This vindictiveness was urged on by men in high places who resented the President’s spirit of clemency as violently as they resented the tenacity of the South.
In December Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the Constitution and the Union of the states, to abide by the government’s pronouncements against slavery. He promised, too, that a Confederate state could return to the Union whenever ten percent of its voters should reestablish a loyal Union government within that state.
Ed brought the boy’s letter down for Matt to read. In it the boy told of the burning of Columbia, of how the soldiers laughed as a great wind fanned the flames, of the loot carried off, of mirrors and pianos smashed, and of intimate family treasures scattered to the winds by men who seemed to have gone mad. […]
“What is this goin’ to do to an eighteen-year-old boy, Matt? Kin a lad come through weeks of this kind of actions without becomin’ a hardened man? Is human life goin’ to be forever cheap to him and decency somethin’ to mock at? […] these boys air goin’ to believe that they be heroes for lootin’ and burnin’, fer laughin’ at distress, fer smashin’ the helpless without pity. In some ways Sammy is more of a child than yore Jeth here; he goes with the crowd without thinkin.’ Mary and me has had to guard against that way of his.
“[…] Jeth, after the thirteenth amendment has become a part of our Constitution and for years afterward [...] there will be men and women with dark faces who will walk the length and width of this land in search of the bright promise the thirteenth amendment holds out to them. […] What’s going to happen to them, Jeth? What will become of men and women who have known nothing but servitude all the days of their lives? They are without experience, without education; they’ll be pawns in the hands of exploiters all over the nation. […] see if [Northern abolitionists] extend the hand of friendship to the uneducated, unskilled men who will come north looking to them as a savior. […] I tell you, all of us are getting a little quieter when the question comes up as to what we are to do about the products of slavery.
