Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

unless it was rooted up, it would choke the last stand of democracy. Walt Whitman, who found part-time government work in Washington so that he could serve as a nurse in the army hospitals, wrote in 1863 that a divided America would reduce the world’s greatest liberal experiment to the level of a third-rate power, which would then lie prone at the feet of England and France. “The democratic republic,” groaned Whitman, has mistakenly granted “the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires.” So long as the war raged, Whitman believed, “there is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it.”4

The war not only endangered the possibility of popular government by inviting foreign intervention but also raised the question of whether, if the Confederacy succeeded, popular government could ever be made to work again at home. “If the ground assumed by the States in revolt is yielded, what bond is there to hold together any two States that may remain—North or South, East or West?” asked Ezra Munday Hunt, a surgeon in the 19th New Jersey. “What becomes of our national power, or title to respect? In such an event, must not the wealth and enterprise and energy of this young nation become the prey of contending factions, and our very name be a hissing and a byword among other nations?” On the other hand, declared one Union colonel at a mass Union rally in Indianapolis in February 1863, if the Union was saved, it would keep the principle of republican government alive for the benefit of every other nation yearning to throw off the shackles of aristocracy. It “would be to not only strengthen our own government, but to shed a radiating light over all the other nations of the world by which the down-trodden people could see their way to liberty.” As a Harvard student named Samuel Storrow (who enlisted in the 44th Massachusetts) explained to his disapproving parents, “What is the worth of this man’s life or of that man’s education if this great and glorious fabric of our Union… is to be shattered to pieces by traitorous hands… If our country and our nationality is to perish, better that we should all perish with it.” This was nationalism of a very ideological sort—not the Romantic nationalism of race and blood, but a highly intellectualized, universal nationalism, based on the open-ended promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.5

For many other men in the Northern armies, as in the Confederate armies, there were considerations that impelled them to sign their lives away that had nothing to do with politics or ideology. Like his Southern counterparts Patrick Cleburne and Joseph Newton Brown, Edward King Wightman of the 9th New York enlisted out of a simple sense of civic obligation. “It is not only desirable that our family should have a representative in the army, but where we are so well able to furnish one, it would be beyond endurance disgraceful for young men [to be] living peacefully and selfishly at home, while the land is rent by faction and threatened with ruin by violence.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a “pretty convinced abolitionist,” but he remembered as his prevailing reason for joining the 20th Massachusetts the need to demonstrate his manhood to his generation. “As life is action and passion,” Holmes wrote twenty-five years later, “it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.” Samuel Hinckley, a Massachusetts mill owner, heartily approved of his son’s enlistment in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, believing that “this civil war will work good to the young men of this age & land.” Peace and prosperity had led to softness and effeminate self-indulgence; now, “money-making & peddling give place to higher aspirations and this war is marking a distinctly manly character in our young men.”6

Few of the white Union recruits listed any interest in destroying slavery as a motivation for enlistment. The 24th Michigan Volunteers gave as their collective reason for enlistment to “fight for the Union and maintain the best government on earth,” not the abolition of Southern slavery. Indiana sergeant Samuel McIlvaine wrote his parents to explain that he had enlisted to defend “this Government, which stands out to the rest of the world as the polestar, the beacon light of liberty & freedom to the human race.” So in February 1862 Sergeant McIlvaine made no effort to stop “three or four slave hunters” from entering the regiment’s campsite and seizing two runaway slaves who “got mixed with the Negro cooks and waiters and were thus endeavoring [to] effect their escape to the North.” Even though the runaways had armed themselves with a pistol and a butcher knife, “they had evidently counted on being protected in the regiment but they were sadly disappointed, as they were disarmed by their pursuers and taken back without molestation on our part.”7

Some Union soldiers were, in fact, even more hostile than their Confederate counterparts to the notion that the war had anything to do with slavery. “If anyone thinks that this army is fighting to free the Negro, or that that is any part of its aim, they are terribly mistaken,” declared Massachusetts sergeant William Pippey. “I don’t believe that there is one abolitionist in one thousand, in the army.” Indianan John McClure had enlisted because he thought “we were fighting for the union and constitution” and not “to free those colored gentlemen.” He was enraged by the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s apparent aim of having “all the niggars on an equality with you” and wished that “if I had my way about things I would