Reading the Civil War

By G. TRACY MEHAN, III

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 1965.

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 bello) 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.