War - for good or evil?

"Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind:
It is better to fight for the good, than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d."
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s British poem MAUD about the Crimean war, 1854-1855.

According to an author, Charles Royster, in the War between the States about a hundred years later, two Generals, William Sherman and Thomas Jackson, representing the North and South respectively, saw that "God was the ultimate guarantor of the intelligibility of war, "... But they saw God working in different ways."

One defender of the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War (1861-18650, who was running for Governor of Ohio, argued that the public should accept the law. He said, "like a soldier fighting in the ranks, I hold it to be my duty to obey him, my commanding officer, in all things, without questioning his policy in this great contest."

In 1864, a black leader, Mr. Randolph told his people, "the dead heroes of those and other bloody fields (of battle in the Civil War) are the seeds of mighty harvests of human goodness and greatness, yet to be reaped by the nations of the world, and by Africa’s sable descendants on the soil of this, our native land."

1865, the CHICAGO TRIBUNE newspaper reminded Americans that "All war is retaliation - suffering - punishment of the innocent for the sins of the guilty."

1880, in Columbus, Ohio General William Sherman warned against hailing its glorious side, when he said, War...is Hell." "Wars are not all evil." Sherman also said late in life, "They are part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed."

Long after the Civil War ended, poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, argued that people "will fight and die to make a different world."

So is War a force for good or evil? A double-edged sword at its worst, war is a blessing in disguise at its best. Contending forces always perceive their causes justly anointed by God and victory, even in an uneasy peace, to be a force for humanitarian progress.