The 1850’s have been called the tormented decade of American history. In those years the slavery question got entirely out of control. In 1850 the problem might still have been settled by debate, compromise, and mutual arrangement, but by 1860 it was insoluble, and war had become virtually inevitable. The nation’s political machinery became progressively less and less able to deal with the nation’s foremost political issue, and finally it collapsed, at a cost which has not yet been entirely paid.
Symptomatic of the process was the increasing resort to violence. To shoot an antagonist came to seem better than to try to persuade him. Taking up arms against a sea of troubles, men simply made the sea stormier, and while they were doing it, violent action began to look reasonable, even praiseworthy. The readiness to go to war in 1861 rested at least partly on this foundation.
One of the most spectacular of the violent-action men of the 1850’s was a wispy, gray-eyed, oddly taciturn man named William Walker, who had a thirst for direct action which seems excessive even for that troubled era and who became the most spectacular filibuster of his times. Properly enough, he at last met the violent end he appears to have courted, but for a while he was famous, the hero of those romantic southern fire-eaters who dreamed of foiling the North by creating a slave-state empire around the shores of the Caribbean Sea.
Today Walker is half-forgotten, remembered only as a troublemaker who fortunately met a firing squad before he had quite exhausted his potential for harm. Yet he was a good deal more complex than he looks, and if he brought tragedy to others he brought it most of all to himself. For this man who became the idol of the most unrestrained advocates of slavery was through most of his life a firm antislavery man and a dedicated friend of the downtrodden. He died at last serving a cause which he would not have dreamed of embracing when he began—driven to it simply because he had become the prisoner of his own eccentric career. William Walker, in short, is worth a second glance, and a genuinely first-rate biography of the man is available in The World and William Walker, by Albert Z. Carr.
Essentially, as Mr. Carr makes clear, Walker was an intense, highly strung romantic in search of a cause. Tennessee-born and raised, he was given a solid education as a physician, but he quickly gave up the practice of medicine, apparently because it bored him. He then read law, but abandoned the practice of law for the same reason; and he found a more congenial career at last as a newspaperman, first in New Orleans and later in San Francisco. In the early 1850’s he was swept away from his moorings by the tide of “manifest destiny,” and he discovered Latin America—conceiving that here was the nation’s chance to fulfill a lofty mission and his own chance to win fame.
His motives were mixed, of course, and the international situation was more so. France apparently had designs on Mexico, England had a grip on Central America and seemed bent on extending it, and most Latin Americans seemed miserably misgoverned and desperately in need of the hope which an extension of democratic institutions and ideals would bring. Walker wanted to help the underdog and foil the conscienceless Europeans; he also, quite simply, wanted dazzling adventures. As Mr. Carr remarks, “his true profession was heroism.” So his new career began.
With an “army” of a few dozen San Franciscans, Walker invaded Mexico, aiming at conquest of the state of Sonora. That he met grotesque failure was beside the point. He proved himself a good soldier and an uncommonly gifted leader of men, his exploit somehow struck the American people as romantic, and he had found his métier. By 1856 he had recruited another raggle-taggle army, had gone to Central America, and had made himself undisputed master of Nicaragua.
He was not the typical filibuster. For one thing, he held his odd little army under strict discipline, so that it neither raped nor looted. The underprivileged peons liked him, and he had a genuine desire to make his conquest mean more than personal aggrandizement. He saw himself, in a cloudy but sincere way, as the agent of a beneficent American democracy. He would bring true freedom, justice, and economic advancement to the people of Central America. Doing all of this he would to be sure become a famous hero, but he would be a good hero.
The World and William Walker, by Albert Z. Carr. Harper & Row. 289 pp. $5.95.
Obviously enough, Walker was somewhat mixed, in his motives and in the way he rationalized them. Here he was the true product of his era, which had much the same difficulties. As Mr. Carr remarks:
“This man with the pedestrian name painted his exotic adventures on so large a canvas, in such brilliant colors, and in so surrealistic a style that it is easy to miss their inner meaning. Through his story the politics of an age may be discerned. His achievements were intimately connected with great issues—whether the Civil War would be fought—where the canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would be dug —whether Cuba and Central America would become part of the United States. The pattern of America’s present-day relations with the Latin-American countries was largely set in Walker’s time, and in spite of him. There is even perhaps in the background of the strange Walker saga a kind of Neanderthal anticipation of the dilemma in which the world finds itself in the mid-twentieth century.”
For Walker had stepped in beyond his depth. It was one thing to overthrow a Nicaraguan government which was disliked by most of its citizens, but by now he had the enmity of extremely powerful interests. The British government strongly opposed him, as did the governments of France and Spain, not to mention the governments of the other Central American republics and an influential bloc of Nicaraguans. Implacable Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose trans-Nicaraguan transportation system was being deranged, very much wanted him out of there. In the long run he could survive only if the government of the United States supported him. And this in the end the government refused to do—partly because the business struck Washington as pretty risky, and partly because it was beginning to look as if Walker might actually stand as a barrier to American territorial expansion in the Caribbean.
Then, at last, the ultra-slavery men of the cotton states offered their aid. They had dreamed of a slave-state empire embracing practically everything from Cuba to Panama. Here, apparently, was the man who could win it for them. If he would forget about bringing a better life to the peons and come out instead for slavery, they could provide recruits, arms, money—and, in the course of time, an independent Southern Confederacy which would expand to the southward and in which he would become a key figure.
By now Walker was in despair. In the face of the rising pressures he could not stay in Nicaragua; he let his ideals go, embracing the cause of expansionist slavery, and became that saddest of figures, the romantic who gives up the essence of his dream in order to seize what looks like the main chance. He went back to the United States, threw himself into the arms of the fire-eaters, raised a new expedition, went down to try the conquest of Honduras—and, in 1860, was beaten, and went to his execution before the rifles of a Honduran firing squad. The fire-eaters had promised him much more than they could deliver, and to get it he had given up much more than he could afford to lose.
His country promptly forgot him, of course. He could remain forgotten, except that he does stand as a symbol of the iSso’s. Trying to do good, he at last did evil; attempting to take a fighter’s way out of perplexity, he succeeded in the end only in making his own problem, as he helped to make America’s, insoluble.
Who Started the War?
By BRUCE CATTON
Walker had been in his grave less than a year when the American Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter—April 12, 1861. Immediately afterward, and continuing down to the present day, there has been an argument: Who really started it? Did Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy, give the orders that began the war—or did President Abraham Lincoln cleverly maneuver things so that he was able to bring the war on even though he gave the appearance of letting the other man start it?
In a way this is an argument over nothing at all. The new Confederate nation wanted the United States forces out of Fort Sumter, and the United States government, knowing that it could not keep its soldiers there, refused to pull them out until somebody shot at them and made them go, and what was really at issue was whether there would be one or two American republics. The immovable force met the irresistible object, the guns went off, and there was a war. The conflict was inevitable, and all the two Presidents did was to accept the fact.
Yet the argument goes on. It is still argued that perhaps North and South need not have gone to war with each other if the canny Lincoln had not managed affairs so that the Confederates would be goaded into firing the first shot. By this argument, the burden rests upon Lincoln. There might have been peace if he had not willfully stirred up a war.
Lincoln and the First Shot, by Richard N. Current. J. B. Lippincott Company. 224 pp. $3.95.
This argument is based upon a complete misreading of the ten years that had gone before. By the time Lincoln became President the lines had been drawn. Seven states had announced their secession; Jefferson Davis was executive officer of something which these seven states had proclaimed to be a new nation. Both Davis and Lincoln were the prisoners of their times. In the middle of April they came to a collision point. Would either man back down? If not, which of the two was responsible for the terrible war soon to begin?
Richard N. Current examines the whole business in a cogent book called Lincoln and the First Shot. Step by step, he studies the events which followed Lincoln’s inaugural address, in which he promised to “hold, occupy and possess” the bits of real estate which his government claimed to own south of the Mason and Dixon line. Mr. Current looks especially into the question of provocation. Was Lincoln really the aggressor?
Lincoln did a number of things. He offered to trade Fort Sumter for a guarantee of the adherence to the Union of the all-important state of Virginia. He at least toyed with the idea of letting Sumter go and taking his stand at Fort Pickens, in Florida. He seems to have allowed his Secretary of State, William H. Seward, to give Jefferson Davis’ emissaries a good deal of double talk; and, in short, he took a solid month to make up his mind what he was going to do, after which he went out of his way to notify the southern authorities that he was going to send supplies into Fort Sumter, tacitly inviting them to make something out of this if they wanted to do so. Did he, thus, intentionally, touch off a war that might have been averted?
The essence of Mr. Current’s conclusion is that neither Lincoln nor Davis could have kept the war from beginning unless he were willing to back down. Neither man wanted a war, but each man could do nothing less than stand by the principles on which he had taken office. As Mr. Current puts it:
“When Lincoln expressed his desire for peace he was sincere, and so was Davis when he did the same. But Lincoln thought of peace for one, undivided country; Davis, of peace for two separate countries. ‘Both parties deprecated war,’ as Lincoln later put it, ‘but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.’ ”
That pretty well says it. Mr. Current argues that Lincoln cannot rightly be accused of jockeying the southern states into starting the war; the most he did was to take a position—which grew logically out of everything he had always stood for—in which, if there was to be a first shot, the southerners would have to fire it.
This seemed like an extremely important point a century ago. By this time we have learned something. We can see that neither of these two Presidents wanted a war and that neither of them had any real notion of what the war that finally came was going to cost. But we can also see that neither man was really a free agent. By the middle of April, 1861, people were no longer just talking about secession. It had happened. If we try to imagine Lincoln and Davis sitting down together and talking about some way of ironing out the difficulties that had arisen between the sections, we are imagining a vain thing. It was too late. By now the sections were going to fight unless one leader or the other gave in, and neither man was the giving-in type. In the spring of 1861 both Lincoln and Davis were, in a sense, the creatures of the decade that had just passed.
Which is to say that by that time the lines had been drawn, and it is idle to talk about “aggression” by either side. Lincoln summed it up, once and for all, in the grim remark: “And the war came.” It came because of what had gone before it. The United States was not maneuvered into that war. It blundered into it, through a long and unhappy decade, and in 1861 it began to pay the price, not for arbitrary acts done by either President but for ten years of failure to grapple with a problem which the ordinary processes of politics ought to have solved.
Heritage of the War
By BRUCE CATTON
From the American Civil War to the beginning of America’s involvement in the Second World War is a long time, and the two things apparently have very little relation with one another. Yet there is a thread connecting them, if it is nothing more than the thin strand that runs through human affairs, tying the man of the 1930’s with the men of the 1860’s; and one is somehow compelled to think about it in examining the career of General George Catlett Marshall, who became America’s top military man just in time to handle the momentous matters that led the United States to go to war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany and the Japanese Empire.
A reminder is at hand in Forrest C. Pogue’s new book, George C. Marshall: Education of a General, 1880-1939. This is the first volume of what will ultimately be a three-volume life of one of America’s great soldiers: the definitive biography, almost certainly, a work very much worth attention. Marshall, of course, first saw daylight long after the Civil War had ended, and yet somehow he had roots that went back to that time: reading about what he was and what he did, one cannot help feeling that he stemmed out of the Civil War era, that the strengths he brought to his high position grew out of things done and learned in that most terrible of conflicts.
To begin with, Marshall appears to have been a born soldier: a man who from his childhood was meant for this calling, one whom the soldier’s duties and responsibilities fitted as the glove fits the hand. As a military cadet and later as a young second lieutenant, he was obviously a man destined to command, a soldier in—let us say—the tradition of Stonewall Jackson, who clearly could have been nothing on earth of any consequence except a leader of fighting men.
In addition, consider this: Marshall was born in Pennsylvania in 1880, and instead of going to West Point he went south, into Virginia, and went to the Virginia Military Institute, which may not seem quite the place for a Yankee. He went there showing no enormous talents as a student. At the end of his third year he ranked only nineteenth in a class of forty-seven—and yet, as everybody in the place expected, he was made first captain of the corps of cadets for his senior year. V. M. I. had seen born soldiers before that, and it recognized this one when it had him.
Beyond which, the old tradition touched him sharply. The superintendent of V. M. I. had been with the cadets who fought the Yankees at New Market, Virginia, in 1864. The walls of the barracks at the Institute still bore the marks of Federal cannon balls, the graves of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were near at hand, and the college catalogue in its listing of graduates gave heavy black type to those who had been killed fighting for the Southern Confederacy. Marshall was never sure that the place gave him a good academic background, but he wrote that it did teach him “self-control, discipline … I learned also the problem of managing men.”
All of this, to be sure, is not the point of Mr. Pogue’s book. He tells the story of Marshall’s career, from his boyhood down to the day in the fall of 1939 when he became chief of staff of the United States Army, with problems of infinite magnitude and consequence lying just ahead of him. It is a fascinating story; it gives a detailed account of the way in which this rather cold and self-contained person became a gifted leader and master of men, and not too much of it rests on the days when he was a boy with his career to make, a lanky Pennsylvanian plodding through the favorite school of the Southern Confederacy.
Yet the point does remain. One of Marshall’s immense virtues was that he recognized throughout his army career that an American general is always going to have to adapt himself to nonmilitary civilians who are only temporary soldiers. He will not, in all probability, have highly trained professionals after the European model; he will have to take gangling lads from the farm, the small town, and the city streets, most of whom would prefer to be anywhere on earth except in the Army, make soldiers out of them, and then find the knack of using them so that they can stand up to the test of battle. Marshall learned this, apparently without trying to—it is worth noting that he did very well when the Army, unable to use the ordinary devices of military discipline, had to handle the Civilian Conservation Corps boys in the early years of the New Deal. It fell to his lot finally to command more soldiers than any other American who ever lived, and by far the most of them were CCC boys enlarged. In the end they did pretty well, and it was George C. Marshall who would have been blamed if they had not.
George C. Marshall: Education of a General, 1880-1939, by Forrest C. Pogue, with a foreword by General Omar N. Bradley. Viking Press. 421 pp. $7.50.
Marshall had a background, in short. His roots went back to that other war which we drifted into by folly and blindness, that war which should have been avoided but was not avoided, that war which cost so much and, as we often are tempted to think, won so little; and the roots were good. Out of the Civil War, we somehow got a heritage which may be a little better than we really deserved. We got a tradition, a knowledge of what the American fighting man is really like, an understanding of what leadership in this democracy actually means. Reflecting on the career of General George Marshall, one is bound to confess that it finally paid off.
