As we come to the close of the first year of the
sesquicentennial commemoration (2011-2015) of the Civil War, we are
struck by the astounding torrent of scholarship and writing
generated in re-telling, refining and elaborating the story of the
nation’s bloodiest and most consequential of its wars, a playing
out of fundamental issues unresolved in the American Revolution
itself.
You could say that for 150 years it has been blood
expressed in ink.
James M.
McPherson, the dean of American Civil War historians, writing
in the bibliographical note to his Pulitzer Prize winning history,
Battle Cry Of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), observed
that he was merely sampling “the huge corpus of literature on the
Civil War era, which totals more than 50,000 books and pamphlets on
the war years alone — not to mention a boundless number of
articles, doctoral dissertations, and manuscript
collections.”
“Indeed, there are said to be more works in English on
Abraham Lincoln than on any other persons except Jesus of Nazareth
and William Shakespeare,” wrote McPherson whose effortless, flowing
prose yielded one of the few masterpieces of
The Oxford History of the United States, a series
originally edited by
C. Vann Woodward, himself a revered figure in the
field.
Very telling, the Washington Post recently ran a
pair of
color photographs on the front page of its Metro section (“A
symbol of Lincoln’s towering legacy,” December 15, 2011) of a
three-story, 34-foot-tall installation featuring thousands of books
about Lincoln. They are fire-proof aluminum fakes. This display is
part of the renovated Ford Theatre’s new Center for Education and
Leadership, across the street from the place where Lincoln was
assassinated in 1865.
I would venture to say that the literature has increased
by half since McPherson published his magnum opus.
Then there are the countless novels, movies and
documentaries, among them Michael Shaara’s 1974 historical novel,
Killer Angels, dramatizing the battle of Gettysburg, which
won the Pulitzer Prize, and the magisterial (yes, I use that
over-used word) Ken Burns production, The Civil
War. It captured 40 million viewers over five consecutive
nights, making it the most popular PBS documentary ever.
And mention must be made of that hardy band of Civil War
reenactors who, at great expense of time and their own money,
pursue the quest for historical accuracy and authenticity across
the American countryside whenever the weather permits. I recall
watching a spirited engagement at Galena, Illinois, one of Grant’s
numerous towns of residence, and found the experience gripping, at
least if you have any kind of imagination at all.
Americans seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for
everything ever written on the bloodiest episode of our history in
which more than 600,000 Americans died on both sides of the
conflict over Union, states rights, and slavery. The latter part of
the previous sentence has, itself, generated its own body of
literature on the true meaning of the conflict. Many experts argued
that the meaning or mission of the conflict changed over time as
the blood flowed and the stakes rose astronomically. Others
maintain that states rights were either a cover for the real issue,
slave-holders’ rights, or so intertwined with it that they were
essentially the same thing.
In 2006 Harry S. Stout, a Yale professor of American
religious history, wrote a “moral history” of the Civil War,
Upon the Altar of the Nation in which he utilized
traditional principles of the just war doctrine to critique the
conflagration less for the justice of its cause (jus ad
bellum) than for its conduct (jus in bello). Stout
viewed the war through the screens of proportionality and
discrimination between combatants and non-combatants, finding it
more akin to total, i.e., immoral, war, again, in its conduct
rather than its cause.
McPherson wrote a very critical, i.e., negative,
review (“Was It a Just War?” New York Review of Books,
March 23, 2006) of Stout’s book and found several dozen factual
errors in the military narrative. Still, he conceded that the book
was “flawed but thought-provoking” and, while not necessarily
offering “the right answers,” “asks many of the right
questions.”
The issues, moral and constitutional, implicated in 19th
century America’s handling of slavery, war, and rebellion are
nothing if not fundamental, accounting for the irresistible draw of
these interrelated subjects decade after decade.
Keeping up with the cascade of books is exhausting. I find
myself going through bouts of Civil War reading, hardly keeping up
with the new scholarship which seems to bring with it an endless
supply of new information, data, insights, and analysis, not to
mention newer, broader subjects ranging from diplomacy, economics,
and even disease. Just the literature on calculating the actual
number of troops in the field for any given battle, net after
factoring in sickness and desertion, is impressive. Eventually, I
have to go cold turkey, giving up reading anything remotely related
to the war due to both emotional and intellectual
exhaustion.
We have come a long way from the elegant, if strictly
military, narratives of Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton, the former
slightly pro-South, the latter slightly pro-North. According to
McPherson, both of them drew on the seminal work of James Ford
Rhodes, who wrote seven volumes from 1892 to 1906, and Allan Nevins
and his eight volumes, penned between 1947 and 1971.
I have longed wondered if the Civil War and its nexus with
slavery, Lincoln, and the westward expansion of the nation actually
fills the role that the classics and ancient history played, say,
for 19th century Englishmen, providing lessons and models of human
suffering, heroism, cowardice, and pathos. There are so many, many
historical persons and episodes from which Americans draw at least
some wisdom as it relates to humanity’s capacity for folly,
tragedy, sacrifice, and perseverance.
As a native of St. Louis, Missouri, I have a long-standing
fascination with the many and varied battles and conflicts, far
removed from the great engagements, say, of Virginia. They were
often savage and very personal given the extent of guerrilla
warfare in the west and the fact that the German minority in St.
Louis conspired with Nathaniel Lyon to keep an essentially
Confederate state out of the Confederacy. Lincoln had won only two
counties in the entire state in the election of 1860, the City of
St. Louis and Gasconade County, both centers of German culture and
social activism. Lincoln was supported by their “Wide Awakes” clubs
which did not carry the state, but soon began to organize a kind of
irregular military force, drilling in secret in beer halls,
factories, and gymnasiums.
The story is told
well by Adam Goodheart in the April 2011 issue of the
American Scholar (“Civil War in St. Louis”). He describes
what today we might call special ops, more insurgency than
counter-insurgency. The Germans served Lyon the way the Northern
Alliance assisted U.S. Special Forces and CIA in the early days of
the war in Afghanistan. They called their force Lyons
Fahnenwacht, “Lyon’s Color Guard.” This time it was German
Americans versus Scots-Irish and other “native” Americans who were
universally pro-Confederacy and secessionists. In this way, the
sitting government of Missouri was driven from power. Holding onto
St. Louis and, eventually, Vicksburg sundered the Confederacy in
the Mississippi River Valley.
Regarding the uglier episodes of guerrilla warfare in
Missouri, William Clarke Quantrill, a brilliant tactician and
leader of Quantrill’s Raiders, led the raid on Lawrence, Kansas,
which resulted in the slaughter of approximately 250 men and
teenage boys, mostly unarmed and unresisting, and the burning of
the town, one of the worst atrocities of the Civil War. For the
rather bizarre story of the rest of his life, including his
conversion to Catholicism, and the disposition of his remains, read
The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke
Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (1976) by Edward E.
Leslie.
I make a cameo appearance in the book. While running the
Missouri Department of Natural Resources for then Governor John
Ashcroft, I was in charge of state parks and historic sites, among
them the Confederate Cemetery at Higginsville, Missouri.
The Missouri Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans
wanted to move Quantrill’s remains, sitting in a box in a state
archaeology lab in Kansas, to Higginsville for proper burial.
However, DNR staff thought the old raider should be buried in his
hometown of Dover, Ohio. As Leslie recounts the story, after the
Sons of Confederate Veterans answered various bureaucratic
objections, “Mehan gave his approval.” Actually, it was a
legitimate debate over how to resolve the matter. Would burying
Quantrill at an official Confederate site besmirch their honor?
They did not think so.
But the horror of the Civil War eventually did end,
peacefully, rather than descending into a protracted insurgency in
the west. Jay Winik’s book
April 1865: The Month That Saved America (2001) explains
how precarious things were but for the willingness of Robert E.
Lee, U.S. Grant, Joseph E. Johnston and even that ferocious
warrior, Nathan Bedford Forrest, to end the bloodshed, finally, and
turn to peaceful pursuits and the healing of the
country.
Lee’s famous General Orders Number 9 stated, “… I
determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past
services have endeared them to their countrymen.”
Joshua L. Chamberlain, “the fighting professor from
Bowdoin College in Maine, who won the Medal of Honor for his valor
at Gettysburg’s Little Roundtop,” was in charge of the surrender at
Appomattox. His description of the formal surrender is as moving a
passage as one can find in the history of American letters. Winik
describes the scene:
Without having planned it-and without any official
sanction-Chamberlain suddenly gave the order for Union soldiers to
“carry arms” as a sign of their deepest mark of military respect. A
bugle call instantly rang out. All along the road, Union soldiers
raised their muskets to their shoulders, the salute of honor. “At
the sound of the machine-like snap of arms,” Chamberlain recalled,
“General Gordon [one of Lee’s hardest fighters, wounded four times,
commanding Stonewall Jackson’s old corps] started… then wheeled his
horse, facing me, touching him gently with the spur so that the
animal slightly reared, and, as he wheeled, horse and rider made
one motion, the horse’s head swung-down with a graceful bow, and
General Gordon dropped his sword-point to his toe in salutation.”
And as he did, the veterans in blue gave a soldierly salute to
those “vanquished heroes” — a “token of respect from Americans to
Americans.”
Gordon, in turn, ordered his men to answer — “honor answering
honor,” said Chamberlain.
“On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of
drum; not a cheer, nor word, nor whisper or vain-glorying, nor
motion of man… but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as
if it were the passing of the dead.”
John Paul the Great, in his last book, wrote
movingly of the organic link between memory and identity. In the
many books written about that cataclysmic event which was the Civil
War, Americans may recover their identity which, although
fragmented along various social and cultural fault lines, is
grounded in a history worth knowing and understanding.
