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

two years of dislocation, shock, and carnage, Americans were groping in exhaustion for the meaning and purpose of the war that would give them some idea of why the war was being fought. For those answers they turned to the philosophers, moralists, and clergymen who constituted the intellectual elite of the American republic and made it what Walt Whitman cheerfully described as a “Union always swarming with blatherers.”65

America was the off spring of movements of the mind, and the South was not the only place in American life where the Enlightenment was enmeshed in the challenge of the Romantics. The most formidable reply to the burden of Enlightenment reason came from Immanuel Kant, and it is from Kant’s formulations of a “transcendent” realm of knowledge that Northern Romantics formulated a critique of Enlightenment politics. Kant’s foremost American admirer was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian clergyman who had abandoned the ministry to take up a life of writing and lecturing across the country. Around Emerson clustered the crown jewels of Boston’s Romantic intellect—Henry Hedge, George Putnam, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Bronson Alcott—whom Emerson styled as Transcendentalists, “from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke.” The Transcendentalists found the “buzz and din” of democratic politics distasteful. They withdrew from an engagement with democratic political culture and celebrated a radical individualism built upon “self-reliance” and “self-culture.” That, in turn, gave them little to admire and still less to understand about a civil war in a democracy. Emerson wanted “to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world as his, and man shall treat man with as a sovereign state with a sovereign state,” and he held himself aloof from even the most pressing reform movements.66

Few of the Transcendentalists bothered their heads with abolition; Emerson, in particular, had been notoriously slow to embrace the anti-slavery cause, not so much from indifference to the moral question at stake as from his reluctance to imbrue his hands in politics. “Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him.” Slavery he opposed, but largely out of the Kantian conviction that slavery was a denial of human authenticity (or free will). With the firing on Fort Sumter, Emerson was surprised almost in spite of himself with how “a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church” and was sweeping up even the most detached and self-reliant minds up in a “whirlwind of patriotism.” Still, few New England intellectuals stayed for long within that whirlwind. Rather than seeing the war as the test of liberalism’s virtues, the Romantic historian Francis Parkman thought that the war had exposed “the fallacies of ultra democracy,” and though he supported the war, it was more for the opportunities it gave young New England blue bloods to demonstrate the individual virtues of heroism, fortitude, and manliness.67 The death of Robert Gould Shaw at Battery Wagner, for instance, was seen less as a blow for racial justice and more as proof that Boston’s wealthy mercantile elite had not grown stagnant and effeminate.

Here is her witness: this, her perfect son,

This delicate and proud New England soul

Who leads despisèd men, with just-unshackled feet,

Up the large ways where death and glory meet,

To show all peoples that our shame is done,

That once more we are clean and spirit-whole.68

Some Romantic intellectuals even hoped that the Civil War would burst the bubble of Americans’ overweened confidence in democracy and lead to the replacement of democratic turbulence with a more orderly and organic notion of society—with themselves as the acknowledged elite. In New York, George Templeton Strong condemned Americans’ preoccupation with “democracy and equality and various other phantasms” and hoped that they “will be dispersed and dissipated and will disappear forever” in the face of civil war. America required the discipline of a strong government, and Charles Stillé, a lawyer and later provost of the University of Pennsylvania, blamed much of the North’s inability to bring the war to a swift conclusion on the discord of democratic politics, “which seems to be the sad but invariable attendant upon all political discussions in a free government, corrupting the very sources of public life. …”69

Romanticism, however, was not the only optic of Northern intellectuals, and no one looked less like a Romantic than Abraham Lincoln. Although he was a politician rather than a philosopher, Lincoln was nevertheless very directly the child of the Enlightenment, of the Declaration and the Constitution. Lincoln argued down slavery by an appeal to the “sacred principles of the laws of nature,” and hailed “the constitution and the laws” as “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.” For Lincoln, the war was a test of the practical worth of liberalism—of whether ordinary people of any race were entitled by nature to govern themselves and create their own governments, and whether that government could be content with allowing those people to pursue their own self-interest and self-improvement. The great offense of slavery was that it forbade self-interest and self-improvement—the interests of the slave counted for nothing, and the improvement of one segment of society would throw the others (starting with the slaveholders) dangerously out of kilter; the great offense of secession was that it was, in reality, nothing but a malevolent attempt to disrupt a constitutional order that encouraged all people, irrespective of race, to pursue that interest and that improvement. “On the side of the Union,” Lincoln said,

it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.70

The fall of 1863 gave Lincoln a perfect opportunity to articulate that understanding of the war