I visited the Forest Hills Cemetery today, on Memorial Day. I rode my bike over for a quiet afternoon visit.  Fresh flags had gone up along the winding roadway in, and commemorative flags marked some of the graves.

I’m reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals history of Lincoln and the Civil War. This book is so engrossing, I was drawn to do something special to mark Memorial Day. I found my way to the Civil War memorial which honors those who had served and those who had died from the town of Roxbury. Back then, Roxbury was independent of Boston and Jamaica Plain a part of it. 

Doing what I do today, I can’t help but think about the communications side of things. The book tells much of the story through accounts of communication by telegraph, swift horses with confidential messages, meticulous daily letter-writing, three hour speeches published in newspapers and carefully shared in groups, lots of travel for face to face meetings. Relative to the technology available, sophistication about communications and  audience played as much of a role then as now. It’s fascinating mapping the strategies from then to political and organizational strategies today. 

But no mistake about it, the social forces  accumulating toward war and ending slavery seem so much more powerful than all the maneuvering and organizing to head it off.  Wandering around Forest Hills Cemetery, 150 years later, I am sad thinking of all that death, and all the death that followed down to the wars of the present. Yes, we are truly better off today for some of it, certainly the Civil War for Emancipation, but not much smarter.