Letters to the Editor
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‘De Montebello Retires’
I would add one thing to your fine editorial about Phillippe de Montebello [Editorial, “De Montebello Retires,” January 10, 2008]. The “best deal in town” is actually being a member of the Metropolitan Museum. It’s $85, so even if one goes only seven to eight times a year it is a great bargain.
DOUGLAS SCHWARTZ
New York, N.Y.
‘Among the Dead’
In the review of the new book “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” both the author Drew Gilpin Faust and the reviewer Adam Kirsch fall in to the very common habit of low-balling the death toll of the Civil War at 600,000 dead [Arts & Letters, “Among the Dead,” January 9, 2008].
That is the number of soldiers actually killed in battle. Disease killed twice as many soldiers as bullets, and death from starvation was rampant throughout the Southern civilian population. The total number of American deaths attributable to the Civil War could be as high as two to three million.
To put that in perspective, that was almost one death per freed slave — there were about three and a half million freed slaves — or 10% of the entire nation’s population at that time.
A comparable death toll in today’s population would be as high as 30 million people. This, of course, in no way takes away from the thrust of Ms. Faust’s book. But as with all books that have been written about the Civil War, nothing comes close to conveying the human mathematics of ending slavery in America better than part of one sentence from Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address.
“Yet if God wills that it continue … until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
ALEXANDER DALE
New York, N.Y.
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