A War That Never Goes Away

"Americans just can’t get enough of the Civil War.” So says a man who should know, Terry Winschel, historian of the Vicksburg National Military Park. Millions of visitors come to Vicksburg and to more than a dozen other Civil War national battlefield and millitary parks every year. More than 40,000 Civil War re-enactors spend hundreds of dollars each on replica weapons, uniforms, and equipment; many of them travel thousands of miles to help re-stage Civil War battles. Another two hundred and fifty thousand Americans describe themselves as Civil War buffs or “hobbyists” and belong to one of the hundreds of Civil War round tables or societies, subscribe to at least one of the half-dozen magazines devoted to Civil War history, or buy and sell Civil War memorabilia.

Above all, Americans buy books on the Civil War. This has always been true. More than 50,000 separate books or pamphlets on the war have been published since the guns ceased firing 125 years ago. In recent years, some 800 titles, many of them reprints of out-of-print works, have come off the presses annually. Nearly every month a new Civil War book is offered by the History Book Club or the Book-of-the-Month Club, often as the main selection. Many bookstore owners echo the words of Jim Lawson, general manager of the Book ‘N Card shop in Falls Church, Virginia. “For the last two years,” he said in 1988, “Civil War books have been flying out of here. It’s not just the buffs who buy; it’s the general public, from high school kids to retired people.”

Although we are approaching the end of the 125th-anniversary commemorations of Civil War events, the boom shows no signs of fading. As a beneficiary of this popular interest in the Civil War, I am often asked to explain what accounts for it—in particular, to explain why my own recent contribution to the literature on the war and its causes, Battle Cry of Freedom, was on national best-seller lists for several months as a hardcover book in 1988 and again as a paperback in 1989. I have a few answers.

First, for Americans, the human cost of the Civil War was by far the most devastating in our history. The 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who lost their lives almost equaled the 680,000 American soldiers who died in all the other wars this country has fought combined. When we add the unknown but probably substantial number of civilian deaths—from disease, malnutrition, exposure, or injury—among the hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Confederacy, the toll of Civil War dead may exceed war deaths in all the rest of American history. Consider two sobering facts about the Battle of Antietam, America’s single bloodiest day. The 25,000 casualties there were nearly four times the number of American casualties on D-day, June 6, 1944. The 6500 men killed and mortally wounded in one day near Sharpsburg were nearly double the number of Americans killed and mortally wounded in combat in all the rest of the country’s 19th-century wars combined—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War.

This ghastly toll gives the Civil War a kind of horrifying but hypnotic fascination. As Thomas Hardy once put it, “War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.” The sound of drum and trumpet, the call to arms, the clashing of armies have stirred the blood of nations throughout history. As the horrors and the seamy side of a war recede into the misty past, the romance and honor and glory forge into the foreground. Of no war has this been more true than of the Civil War, with its dashing cavaliers, its generals leading infantry charges, its diamond-stacked locomotives and paddle-wheeled steamboats, its larger-than-life figures like Lincoln, Lee, Jackson, Grant, and Sherman, its heroic and romantic women like Clara Barton and “Mother” Bickerdyke and Rose O’Neal Greenhow, its countless real-life heroines and knaves and heroes capable of transmutation into a Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, or Ashley Wilkes.

If romance is the other face of horror in our perception of the Civil War, the poignancy of a brothers’ war is the other face of the tragedy of a civil war. In hundreds of individual cases the war did pit brother against brother, cousin against cousin, even father against son. This was especially true in border states like Kentucky, where the war divided such famous families as the Clays, Crittendens, and Breckinridges and where seven brothers and brothers-in-law of the wife of the United States President fought for the Confederate States. But it was also true of states like Virginia, where Jeb Stuart’s father-in-law commanded Union cavalry, and even of South Carolina, where Thomas F. Drayton became a brigadier general in the Confederate army and fought against his brother Percival, a captain in the Union navy, at the Battle of Port Royal. Who can resist the painful human interest of stories like these—particularly when they are recounted in the letters and diaries of Civil War protagonists, preserved through generations and published for all to read as a part of the unending stream of Civil War books?

Indeed, the uncensored contemporary descriptions of that war by participants help explain its appeal to modern readers. There is nothing else in history to equal it. Civil War armies were the most literate that ever fought a war up to that time, and twentieth-century armies censored soldiers’ mail and discouraged diary keeping. Thus we have an unparalleled view of the Civil War by the people who experienced it. This has kept the image of the war alive in the families of millions of Americans whose ancestors fought in it. When speaking to audiences as diverse as Civil War buffs, Princeton students and alumni, and local literary clubs, I have sometimes asked how many of them are aware of forebears who fought in the Civil War. I have been surprised by the large response, which demonstrates not only a great number of such people but also their consciousness of events that happened so long ago yet seem part of their family lore today.

This consciousness of the war, of the (past as part of the present, continues to be more intense in the South than elsewhere. William Faulkner said of his native section that the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. As any reader of Faulkner’s novels knows, the Civil War is central to that past that is present; it is the great watershed of Southern history; it is, as Mark Twain put it a century ago after a tour through the South, “what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.” The symbols of that past-in-present surround Southerners as they grow up, from the Robert E. Lee Elementary School or Jefferson Davis High School they attend and the Confederate battle flag that flies over their statehouse to the Confederate soldier enshrined in bronze or granite on the town square and the family folklore about victimization by Sherman’s bummers. Some of those symbols remain highly controversial and provoke as much passion today as in 1863: the song “Dixie,” for example, and the Confederate flag, which for many Southern whites continue to represent courage, honor, or defiance while to blacks they represent racism and oppression.

This suggests the most important reason for the enduring fascination with the Civil War among professional historians as well as the general public: Great issues were at stake, issues about which Americans were willing to fight and die, issues whose resolution profoundly transformed and redefined the United States. The Civil War was a total war in three senses: It mobilized the total human and material resources of both sides; it ended not in a negotiated peace but in total victory by one side and unconditional surrender by the other; it destroyed the economy and social system of the loser and established those of the winner as the norm for the future.

The Civil War was fought mainly by volunteer soldiers who joined the colors before conscription went into effect. In fact, the Union and Confederate armies mobilized as volunteers a larger percentage of their societies’ manpower than any other war in American history—probably in world history, with the possible exception of the French Revolution. And Civil War armies, like those of the French Revolution, were highly ideological in motivation. Most of the volunteers knew what they were fighting for, and why. What were they fighting for? If asked to define it in a single word, many soldiers on both sides would have answered: liberty. They fought for the heritage of freedom bequeathed to them by the Founding Fathers. North and South alike wrapped themselves in the mantle of 1776. But the two sides interpreted that heritage in opposite ways, and at first neither side included the slaves in the vision of liberty for which it fought. The slaves did, however, and by the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863, the North also fought for “a new birth of freedom. …” These multiple meanings of freedom, and how they dissolved and reformed in kaleidoscopic patterns during the war, provide the central meaning of the war for the American experience.

When the “Black Republican” Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 on a platform of excluding slavery from the territories, Southerners compared him to George III and declared their independence from “oppressive Yankee rule.” “The same spirit of freedom and independence that impelled our Fathers to the separation from the British Government,” proclaimed secessionists, would impel the “liberty loving people of the South” to separation from the United States government. A Georgia secessionist declared that Southerners would be “either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it. ” Young men from Texas to Virginia rushed to enlist in this “Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence” and to raise “the standard of Liberty and Equality for white men” against “our Abolition enemies who are pledged to prostrate the white freemen of the South down to equality with negroes.” From “the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us,” declared Jefferson Davis at the outset of war, let us “renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.”

But most Northerners ridiculed these Southern professions to be fighting for the ideals of 1776. That was “a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of ’76,” said the anti-slavery poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant. The founders had fought “to establish the rights of man … and principles of universal liberty.” The South, insisted Bryant, had seceded “not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. … Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.” Northerners did not deny the right of revolution in principle; after all, the United States was founded on that right. But “the right of revolution,” wrote Lincoln in 1861, “is never a legal right. … At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.” In Lincoln’s judgment, secession was just such a wicked exercise. The event that precipitated it was Lincoln’s election by a constitutional majority. As Northerners saw it, the Southern states, having controlled the national government for most of the previous two generations through their domination of the Democratic party, now decided to leave the Union just because they had lost an election.

For Lincoln and the Northern people, it was the Union that represented the ideals of 1776. The republic established by the Founding Fathers as a bulwark of liberty was a fragile experiment in a 19th-century world bestridden by kings, emperors, czars, and dictators. Most republics through history had eventually been overthrown. Some Americans still alive in 1861 had seen French republics succumb twice to emperors and once to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Republics in Latin America came and went with bewildering rapidity. The United States in 1861 represented, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope” for the survival of republican liberties in the world. Would that hope also collapse? “Our popular government has often been called an experiment,” Lincoln told Congress on July 4, 1861. But, if the Confederacy succeeded in splitting the country in two, it would set a fatal precedent that would destroy the experiment. By invoking this precedent, a minority in the future might secede from the Union whenever it did not like what the majority stood for, until the United States fragmented into a multitude of petty, squabbling autocracies. “The central idea pervading this struggle,” said Lincoln, “is the necessity … of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether, in a free government, the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.”

Many soldiers who enlisted in the Union army felt the same way. A Missourian joined up as “a duty I owe my country and to my children to do what I can to preserve this government as I shudder to think what is ahead of them if this government should be overthrown.” A New England soldier wrote to his wife on the eve of the First Battle of Bull Run: “I know … how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.”

Freedom for the slaves was not part of the liberty for which the North fought in 1861. That was not because the Lincoln administration supported slavery; quite the contrary. Slavery was “an unqualified evil to the negro, to the white man … and to the State,” said Lincoln on many occasions in words that expressed the sentiments of a Northern majority. “The monstrous injustice of slavery … deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites. …” Yet, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln declared that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with … slavery in the States where it exists.” He reiterated this pledge in his first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, when the Civil War was nearly three months old.

What explains this apparent inconsistency? The answer lies in the Constitution and in the Northern polity of 1861. Lincoln was bound by a constitution that protected slavery in any state where citizens wanted it. The republic of liberty for whose preservation the North was fighting had been a republic in which slavery was legal everywhere in 1776. That was the great American paradox—a land of freedom based on slavery. Even in 1861, four states that remained loyal to the Union were slave states, and the Democratic minority in free states opposed any move to make the war for the Union a war against slavery.

But, as the war went on, the slaves themselves took the first step toward making it a war against slavery. Coming into Union lines by the thousands, they voted with their feet for freedom. As enemy property they could be confiscated by Union forces as “contraband of war.” This was the thin edge of the wedge that finally broke apart the American paradox. By 1863, a series of congressional acts plus Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had radically enlarged Union war aims. The North henceforth fought not just to restore the old Union, not just to ensure that the nation born in 1776 “shall not perish from the earth,” but to give that nation “a new birth of freedom.”

Northern victory in the Civil War resolved two fundamental, festering issues left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776: whether this fragile republican experiment called the United States would survive and whether the house divided would continue to endure half slave and half free. Both these issues remained open questions until 1865. Many Americans doubted the Republic’s survival; many European conservatives predicted its demise; some Americans advocated the right of secession and periodically threatened to invoke it; eleven states did invoke it in 1860 and 1861. But since 1865, no state or region has seriously threatened secession, not even during the “massive resistance” to desegregation from 1954 to 1964. Before 1865 the United States, land of liberty, was the largest slaveholding country in the world. Since 1865 that particular “monstrous injustice” and “hypocrisy” has existed no more.

In the process of preserving the Union of 1776 while purging it of slavery, the Civil War also transformed it. Before 1861, the words United States were a plural noun: “The United States are a large country.” Since 1865 United States has been a singular noun. The North went to war to preserve the Union; it ended by creating a nation. This transformation can be traced in Lincoln’s most important wartime addresses. The first inaugural address contained the word Union twenty times and the word nation not once. In Lincoln’s first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, he used Union 49 times and nation only three times. In his famous public letter to Horace Greeley of August 22, 1862, concerning slavery and the war, Lincoln spoke of the Union nine times and the nation not at all.

But, in the Gettysburg Address 15 months later, he did not refer to the Union at all, but used the word "nation"
five times. And, in the second inaugural address, looking back over the past four years, Lincoln spoke of one side’s seeking to dissolve the Union in 1861 and the other side’s accepting the challenge of war to preserve the nation. The old decentralized Republic, in which the post office was the only agency of national government that touched the average citizen, was transformed by the crucible of war into a centralized polity that taxed people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect the taxes, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a federally chartered banking system, drafted men into the Army, and created the Freedman’s Bureau as the first national agency for social welfare. Eleven of the first 12 amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, starting with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, radically expanded those powers at the expense of the states. The first three of these amendments converted 4,000,000 slaves into citizens and voters within five years, the most rapid and fundamental social transformation in American history—even if the nation did backslide on part of this commitment for three generations after 1877.

From 1789 to 1861, a Southern slaveholder was president of the United States two-thirds of the time, and two-thirds of the Speakers of the House and presidents pro tem of the Senate had also been Southerners. Twenty of the 35 Supreme Court justices during that period were from the South, which always had a majority on the Court before 1861. After the Civil War, a century passed before another resident of a Southern state was elected president. For half a century after the war, hardly any Southerners served as Speaker of the House or president pro tem of the Senate, and only nine of the 30 Supreme Court justices appointed during that half-century were Southerners. The institutions and ideology of a plantation society and a caste system that had dominated half of the country before 1861 and sought to dominate more went down with a great crash in 1865 and were replaced by the institutions and ideology of free-labor entrepreneurial capitalism. For better or for worse, the flames of Civil War forged the framework of modern America.

So, even if the veneer of romance and myth that has attracted so many of the current Civil War camp followers were stripped away, leaving only the trauma of violence and suffering, the Civil War would remain the most dramatic and crucial experience in American history. That fact will ensure the persistence of its popularity and its importance as a historical subject as long as there is a United States.