Very few facts of any real consequence still remain to be dug up about the American Civil War. History’s secrets have been largely disclosed. We know about that war just about as much as our grandchildren will know, and the area of our knowledge today is not very much broader than it was a generation ago. Most of the returns are in, and they have long since been tabulated and analyzed.
Yet books about the war continue to be written, and since both authors and publishers work, very largely, in response to economic motivations, this can only mean that the American people still want to read such books. They want them, indeed, in a greater volume than at any time within living memory, and there is every indication that this desire will remain strong for a number of years to come. Which leads to the interesting question why.
It is easy enough to come up with stock answers—that this war was a prodigious experience, that almost everyone in America had a part in it, that our racial memory remains fascinated by the infinite drama and pathos of “the war between brothers,” and that in this present era of uncertainty and doubt people look back to the supreme moment of national crisis to see how we managed to get through it and what lessons it may offer for people who have to live in the modern world.
Yet all of those answers taken together are not quite enough. They are perfectly correct, but when they are added together something essential is lacking. The Civil War story has been there all along, its salient facts all taped and docketed, and the diligent students who have plowed the field so thoroughly have left very little room for important new discoveries. The current spate of interest in the war certainly does not depend on the writers’ ability to come up with hithero undiscovered data; most emphatically, it does not mean that the American public has abruptly developed a fondness for reading an unending rehash of an old familiar story.
What is going on now, clearly, is a deep and frequently moving examination of the emotional significance of this most profound of all our national experiences. It is probable that we are not yet wholly rational beings. We approach true understanding through our emotions rather than through our intellects, deplorable as that may be, and although we know about all we need to know about the facts of the war we are still feeling our way toward a comprehension of what those facts mean.
For above and beyond everything else, the Civil War was a matter of the emotions. It came about because men’s emotions ran away with them; it was borne, North and South, for four mortal years because those emotions remained strong; and its final significance, nowadays, is often more a matter for the heart than the head. Except for the dedicated student, nobody in particular cares to know more than is already known about the inner whys and wherefores of (to take a case at random) the great Battle of Gettysburg; yet the man who can make us feel and see that stupendous fight will get our attention because he helps us to comprehend the enormous intangibles which were involved there. Those intangibles, at Gettysburg and elsewhere throughout the Civil War story, reveal themselves most readily to the person whose feelings and imagination have been touched. Perhaps we ought to be able to reason our way to them, but most of us cannot. They come in moments of insight born of emotional understanding. There are many things about the Civil War which no historian can actually prove; he can only show them.
Which may help to explain why so much of the Civil War story nowadays is being told by the amateurs. With certain notable exceptions, the retelling which is going on is not the work of the established historians; it is being done very largely by the academically unsanctified. Whether this points to a shortcoming on the part of the established historians or to the chance that something may be wrong with the reading public is a separate question. The point is that what we are getting now is a useful, though at times a highly inexpert, re-examination of the Civil War which somehow reaches people who were not reached previously. It rarely gives us any facts that were not previously known; what it frequently does is help us to see things which were not formerly clear.
An excellent example is Mr. Earl Schenck Miers’ new biography, Robert E. Lee. There already exist a great many studies of Lee. When Douglas Southall Freeman finished the monumental seven volumes devoted to Lee and Lee’s lieutenants he left very little ground for later biographers to work, and for the reader who does not want Freeman’s exhaustive detail there are plenty of excellent one-volume biographies of Lee. Yet Mr. Miers’ brief book—it can hardly run to more than 60,000 words—is well worth having. It is not simply a reworking of familiar material. It is a fresh look at Lee; an attempt to understand what the man was about, what moved him, and what his significance is in the story of the American people.
Robert E. Lee, by Earl Schenck Miers. Alfred A. Knopf. 203 pp. $2.50.
There are no surprises here; none are to be expected. Lee is, in this book as in all others, the genuinely great soldier, the man who in his own lifetime became a legend and always lived up to it, making the legend true. He was at his noblest, as Mr. Miers sees him, in the years after Appomattox, when he uncomplainingly threw himself into the task of helping the South back into its place in the Union. Few Americans have shown greater strength of character than Lee showed then.
Yet there was a limitation in the man—a singular inability to see and feel the main currents of his time. Disbelieving in secession and in slavery, he went to war to support both; he could never quite understand how Lincoln could turn slavery (in Mr. Miers’ phrase) into “a weapon of moral fission” and maneuver the South into the position of opposing one of humanity’s most basic aspirations. His Gettysburg campaign was doomed, not because the military cards were stacked against him, but because he understood in 1863 no better than he had understood in 1861 why the people of the North were really supporting Lincoln and the Union cause. In 1864 he and his army were brought to stalemate not so much by the superior resources of the North as by the fact that Lincoln had a vision which Lee never had—“a superb wholeness,” as Mr. Miers puts it, “a broad, sweeping vision that had grasped the military, political, psychological and philosophical necessities of the great American conflict.”
Here was the real tragedy of Lee. One of the great upward thrusts of the American spirit took place, and he never sensed it. The virtue of this little gem of a book is that it fully presents Lee’s greatness but also brings this tragic shortcoming into high relief.
By BRUCE CATTON
Think Again
This re-examination of the Civil War, however, is not entirely a matter of emotional understanding. As David Donald points out, it is also a matter for the mental processes—for “rethinking,” as he expresses it, for taking the enormous mass of data and looking it over carefully, for trying to determine (now that the jury has all of the important facts) just what the verdict ought to be.
Mr. Donald contributes immeasurably to this task in his new book, Lincoln Reconsidered. In this collection of essays he remarks that “the future is not likely to see major discoveries of new facts or fresh sources in the Civil War period”; what it does need is a fresh examination of the basic issues involved, a conscientious attempt to evaluate what is already known in the light of the new perspective which is ours simply because we come on the scene nearly a century after the shooting stopped.
What Mr. Donald is out to do—and very well he does it—is to take a fresh look at the whole Lincoln story in the light of modern scholarship and see what it all amounts to. He examines Lincoln from many angles—as political leader, as a figment of folklore, as military man, as the hero of emancipation—and he has a knack for expressing judgments that sound as fresh as if the whole subject were unexplored territory.
Best of all, he has the insight to realize that hardand-fast judgments are not possible. Lincoln was one of the most complex and mysterious characters that America ever produced. His faults and virtues were strangely mixed, and sometimes what looks like a fault turns out to be a great source of strength. Lincoln was an opportunist, he drifted with the tide, he refused to be bound by doctrine or dogma, he handled each problem as it came to him—and if this sometimes drove his confreres almost to the point of madness, it was one of his chief elements of strength.
The popular picture of Lincoln is somewhat askew. We have been invited to look on him as the man who was hated by the politicians and loved by the people; yet there has not been in American history a cannier politician; the chance that was open to him to pose as the champion of the masses was simply missed, and Mr. Donald finds reason to doubt that in 1864 Lincoln held as tight a grip on the popular imagination as we usually suppose. What could have been done with the Lincoln myth, Mr. Donald suggests, by a modern publicity agent, is something to think about. He had everything—child of poor parents, born in a log cabin, a rail splitter and a painfully honest man, one who came up the hard way with no apparent advantages and everything against him—yet by modern standards almost no use was made of this in his political battles. Dipping his pen in acid, Mr. Donald muses: “The whole campaign, if managed by a Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn agent, should have been as appealing, as saccharine, as successful as the famous 1952 television appearance of our current Vice President.”
Lincoln Reconsidered, by David Donald. Alfred A. Knopf. 200 pp. $3.
Lincoln won neither the press, the politicians, nor the people; yet he was one of the most successful politicians in American history, he was the first President since Andrew Jackson to win re-election, and he got there (says Mr. Donald) primarily because he was a phenomenally successful operator of the political machine.
“Such a verdict,” Mr. Donald admits, “at first seems almost preposterous, for one thinks of Lincoln’s humility, so great as to cause his opponents to call him a ‘Uriah Heep’; of his frankness, which brought him the epithet ‘Honest Abe’; of his well-known aversion for what he termed the ‘details of how we get along.’ Lincoln carefully built up this public image of himself as a babe in the Washington Wilderness”; but he knew all the tricks, he played all of them in season and out of season, and in the end he won his chance to be a statesman by being superb practical politician.
It is much the same, Mr. Donald believes, with the popular picture of the radical Republicans. They are usually cast as the villains of the Civil War drama. They obstructed Lincoln at every step, they thirsted for blood and vengeance, their devious schemes masked nothing much loftier than a desire for high tariffs and a clear field for the rising northern industrialists, and altogether they were a bad lot, grasping and sly and conscienceless and, often enough, physically unattractive to boot. To this verdict Mr. Donald returns a simple “Nonsense.” The radicals were very diverse people; they did not agree among themselves; they supported Lincoln more often than they combatted him; and as a general thing Lincoln knew exactly how to get along with them. “The Radical Republicans were only one of the many factions that pulled for control of the Lincoln administrations. Because they were noisy and conspicuous, their historical importance has been overstated. Beyond simple anti-slavery zeal, they held few ideas in common”—and, all in all, this writer suggests that it is time we thought more about them.
Lincoln Reconsidered is one of the most useful books in the Civil War field to appear in many years. It emphasizes a point of importance: that although we do have the facts about this period, we have not yet fully digested them, and we need to do a great deal more meditating before we arrive at final conclusions. Written with insight and a biting wit, this little book is a work of real significance.
By BRUCE CATTON
The Other Extreme
From Lee and Lincoln to General Daniel E. Sickles is about as long a stride as one can take and still remain in the field of the Civil War. If Lee was nobility of spirit personified, Sickles was little better than an outright heel. A man of immense drive and energy, he was singularly lacking in principle. To him the whole immense conflict was little more than an opening by which a canny fellow on the make could pick up some good things for himself, and he went out picking with immense gusto and pertinacity.
In himself, Sickles was quite unimportant, although he was (at least in retrospect) an interesting sort of buzzard. His significance lies in the fact that he was a type. He exemplified perfectly the grasping, conscienceless operators who swarmed in on Washington during the war and did all that men could do to keep the deep moral issues underlying the conflict from becoming evident. If certain southerners have felt that the whole northern war effort represented nothing more than a scramble for riches and power, Sickles is one of the reasons.
Sickles gets the full treatment in Sickles the Incredible, by W. A. Swanberg. This book shows him as a Tammany lawyer who was forever acquiring money, trouble, and notoriety in large quantities. His true character is perfectly illustrated by a sensational murder case in which he figured shortly before the war.
His wife had an affair with Philip Barton Key. Sickles found out about it and (himself one of the most flagrantly unfaithful husbands who ever lived) went into a great emotional tizzy. He made his wife give him a signed confession, went out and shot Key to death, won acquittal on the ground of temporary insanity—and by the use of that written confession—and then calmly took his wife back into his home and resumed his domestic life quite as if nothing had happened.
Sickles the Incredible, by W. A. Swanberg. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 423 pp. $6.
When war came he opted for the Union, raised a brigade of infantry, and became a general. As a fighter he was valiant, though somewhat clumsy. He flouted Meade’s orders at Gettysburg, put his troops into an unsound position and nearly lost the battle thereby —losing one of his own legs in the process. Then, afterward, by dint of pertinacity and immense political influence, he did his utmost to prove that his unwise move had been the height of tactical wisdom and that he had saved the Union cause. He managed to stir up such a fuss that the whole latter part of Meade’s life was clouded by the controversy.
After the war he had further adventures. As military governor of the Carolinas during the Reconstruction era, he was tied in with one of the half-legendary wisecracks of American history. It was at a meeting over which Sickles presided that the governor of South Carolina turned to the governor of North Carolina and remarked: “There is a long time between drinks.”
Sickles found himself accidentally on the side of the angels at one time, playing a leading part in getting Jay Gould and Jim Fisk out of the Erie Railroad; then he became minister to Spain, clouding Spanish-American relations so thoroughly that it took a long time to get them untangled. In his old age he picked up the role of one-legged veteran and continued to push his tattered claims to the title of hero of Gettysburg. He did not die until 1914, a gusty, controversial old figure to the end.
Mr. Swanberg has given him an excellent biography, avoiding moral pronouncements and steering neatly away from the isn’t-this-rascal-amusing flipness that is apt to creep into books of this kind. He lets the general’s life and works speak for themselves.
By BRUCE CATTON
Let the People Know
The reporters who covered the war for northern newspapers were an unusual lot. They came on the scene, really, before they were ready. The concept of the newspaperman as an unbiased chap who is simply trying to tell an accurate story of important events without regard for any other considerations had hardly begun to dawn on the journalistic profession in 1861; yet here, suddenly, was a tremendous convulsion which raised the public hunger for unadorned news to a height it had never reached before. The modern reporter overnight became a necessity. Since he did not then exist it was necessary to invent him, even though the inventors hardly realized what they were doing.
Emmet Crozier describes this process in Yankee Reporters: 1861–65, and contributes one of the best in the recent series of books which have been devoted to the subject. As a veteran newspaperman and a war correspondent of wide experience, Mr. Crozier is well fitted for the task. If, at times, he seems to feel that the Civil War reporters were always right and that the Union generals they had to contend with were always wrong, a brief glance at some of the generals involved makes the point of view understandable.
The war correspondent in the i86o’s had an exceedingly tough job. The physical facilities for proper performance of his work were almost entirely lacking. The army had no idea of the importance of providing news for the people back home, although it could not exist unless those people understood what it was up to. Quite typical of the reaction of the higher brass was William Tecumseh Sherman’s angry ouburst. News? asked Sherman. Why, every soldier in the army wrote regular letters to the folks back home; that was all the news anybody needed. Sherman used to threaten to hang reporters, and once or twice he came tolerably close to carrying out the threats.
Yankee Reporters: 1861–65, by Emmet Crozier. Oxford University Press. 441 pp. $6.
If the reporters had trouble with the generals, they also had trouble with themselves. They would gaily print news of immense value to the enemy, they would retail camp gossip by the column, and they were not above pronouncing judgment on the skill, patriotism, and intelligence of the generals about whom they wrote—especially if those generals had made things a little tough for them. They were woefully underpaid, many of them were excessively inaccurate in their reports, and all in all most of them fell far short of modern standards of reportorial competence.
But with all of their faults, they finally did an important job. Out of their work came the new idea of the place of the news reporter, an idea which is essential to the working of democracy. Out of it, too, came enlightenment for the American people.
By BRUCE CATTON
Mr. Lincoln’s Weapons
Abraham Lincoln represented the frontier in many ways, not the least of which was the fact that he was an incurable linkerer. Mechanical appliances fascinated him. The frontiersman had so many chunks of hard manual labor to perform that any mechanical shortcut was bound to strike his fancy: Lincoln had tried his own hand at inventing, and the man with an interesting gadget to display could always catch his interest.
As a war President, Lincoln had a wide-open chance to indulge this interest. He was commander in chief of armies engaged in the first of the modern wars, and most of the authorities with whom he had to deal considered the old-style muzzle-loader (for infantry and for field artillery alike) wholly adequate. Perfectly practical breech-loading repeaters were being made, and the mechanical revolution was quite ready to extend the scope, intricacy, and general effectiveness of all the weapons the Army and Navy could ask for; but except for Lincoln himself, hardly anybody in Washington seemed to be interested.
Lincoln and the Tools of War, by Robert V. Bruce, foreword by Benjamin P. Thomas. The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc. 368 pp. $5.
As a result, Lincoln himself broadened the dimensions of the presidency by becoming, in effect, his own Office of Scientific Research and Development, not to mention his own War Production Board. To him came inventors of high and low degree, and if they could see no one else in the government they could usually manage to see him. Fighting constantly against the inertia of a uniformed bureaucracy, Lincoln did his utmost to equip the Union armies with up-to-date weapons.
This little-known aspect of Lincoln’s presidency is interestingly set forth by Mr. Robert V. Bruce in a stimulating new book, Lincoln and the Tools of War. If Lincoln was a brooding mystic he was also an eternal Yankee, and this trait was not the least of his assets in his struggle to preserve the Union.
He gave to the army, for instance, breech-loading rifles. (They were not universally used, by any means, but they made their effect felt.) He pushed through a machine gun decades ahead of his time; if the army brass distrusted it and finally shelved it, it was nevertheless a perfectly good weapon—one which Lincoln could understand even if the generals could not. He experimented with rockets, explosives, submarines, mines; nearly lost his life, in fact, when a rocket blew up while he was watching a demonstration. Any citizen who entered the White House carrying a shiny new rifle was apt to be ushered into the President’s office instead of being arrested by the secret service as a potential assassin.
Here, altogether, is a new glimpse at Lincoln; a completely fascinating one which adds immeasurably to one’s understanding of what the great emancipator was up against in his White House years.
By BRUCE CATTON
Desolate South
A good part of the South was a wasteland by the summer of 1865. Where the armies had gone there was outright physical devastation; where they had not gone there was the desolation due to the collapse of an economy and a social system. Across this wasteland, a few months after Appomattox, went a Yankee reporter to take notes on what he saw and to try to render a report on what the war had left.
The reporter may have been oddly chosen. He was John T. Trowbridge, an antislavery reporter, magazine writer and editor, who during the war had served neither in the army nor as a war correspondent but simply as a propagandist safe in New England. The ground he was to cover, the fighting that had furrowed it, and the people who lived upon it were all new to him. But he wrote, finally, a book which was substantially better than anyone had a right to expect. Edited by Gordon Carroll, this book has now been reissued under the title, The Desolate South: 1865–1866, and it is well worth reading.
Trowbridge seems to have begun by seeing what he expected to see. The battlefields themselves were monuments to northern valor and southern error. The recently freed Negroes were sober, hard-working, and orderly; the dispossessed southerners who had so recently owned them were idle, ready to subsist on government handouts, unwilling and unable to make their own way and rebuild their shattered country. Everything, in short, fitted the preconceptions of a stout abolitionist who had never looked at any of this before.
The Desolate South: 1865-1866, by John T. Trowbridge, edited by Gordon Carroll. Duell, Sloan and Pearce-Little, Brown. 320 pp. $6.
But experience brought wisdom; furthermore Trowbridge was at bottom a first-rate reporter, a man of perception and understanding. Presently he found, in his editor’s words, that he was “more concerned about the future welfare of a restored Union than he was in recounting the fears and terrors of a cruel war so recently won by the cause in which he believed.”
As a result, this book—reduced to readable proportions by skillful editing—stands as a memorable picture of what the South looked like in the year immediately following the war. Southerners had not yet had time to become “reconstructed”; they had hardly had time to realize what had happened to them. Everything was in ferment, Union troops still occupied the area, and to most people—black and white alike—the mere task of getting enough to eat was all-engrossing. Trowbridge talked to everyone who would give him a word (some southerners, recognizing him as a Yankee, gave him some tolerably hard words) and he wound up with a story which was neither for nor against but simply about.
Following Sherman’s trail, he wrote factually and unemotionally about what Sherman’s men had done. In Columbia, South Carolina—still pretty badly charred from Sherman’s fire—he made no attempt to gloss over the behavior of the Union soldiers. And he could find room for one salty quote, from a South Carolinian speaking his mind about Yankees: “They’ve left me just one inestimable privilege—to hate ‘em! I get up at half past four in the morning and sit up till twelve at night to hate ‘em.”
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By BRUCE CATTON
The Town Hall
In the Elegant Eighties and Naughty Nineties, Town Halls flourished like mushrooms on American soil. To them flocked entertainment-hungry audiences who laughed and wept and cheered for political speakers and minstrel shows and pure-young-girls-betrayed and Mark Twain. Harlowe R. Hoyt has re-created in Town Hall Tonight the whole gaudy world of the grass roots theater, from P. T. Barnum’s lectures on temperance to ten-twent’-thirt’ melodrama. Using his grandfather’s Concert Hall in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, as a prototype of the American Town Hall, he restages a joyous collection of scenes from a time gone by.
Town Hall Tonight, by Harlowe R. Hoyt. Prentice-Hall, Inc. 292 pp. $7.50.
There was a time when the success of Little Lord Fauntleroy produced in countless romantic mothers an urge to clothe their sons in velveteen knickers and ruffled collars—still worse, to ask their outraged offspring to call them “Dearest.” There was a time when audiences thrilled to see Laura Cortland, heroine of Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight, locked in a ticket office while goodhearted Snorkey, lashed to the railroad tracks, awaited an oncoming express.
But wait! Laura seizes an ax, Snorkey encourages her. “Don’t mind the lock—cut around it!” (Steam whistle heard offstage, then a rumble on the tracks.) Laura hacks away. Snorkey cries out, “There’s a true woman for you! Courage!” Laura rushes to his side. (Glare of headlights illuminates stage.) Says Snorkey, “Victory! Saved! Hooray! And these are the women who ain’t to have a vote!” (As Laura takes his head from the track, the train rushes past … CURTAIN.)
The book is gaily illustrated with some fine old photographs, including Tom Thumb and his wife, Loie Fuller doing her famous skirt dance, and the only picture of Lillian Russell in tights.
