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

The instinct of many survivors of the war was to create sanctuaries from this corruption where they could preserve the meanings they thought they had fought for. The veterans of the Union armies quickly melted back into the civilian population with a minimum of tension, separating back into the spectrum of lives and occupations they had temporarily left behind. But the turmoil over Reconstruction sparked the establishment of a wave of veterans’ organizations. These included the Boys in Blue, Soldiers and Sailors Leagues, White Boys in Blue, Conservative Army and Navy Union, Colored Soldiers Leagues, National Conventions of Soldiers and Sailors—but the most expansive of them all was the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Originally founded in 1866, the GAR became one of the principal refuges for old soldiers who had fought for a very different world than the one they found around them.18

In more than 7,000 GAR posts across the United States, former soldiers could immerse themselves in a bath of sentimental memory; there, they reestablished a ritualized camp geography, rekindled their devotion to emancipation, and preached the glories of manly independence. “By this service, without distinction of race or creed,” read one of the GAR’s service booklets, prescribing the proper procedures for memorializing the war dead, “we renew our pledge to exercise a spirit of fraternity among ourselves, of charity to the destitute wards of the Grand Army, and of loyalty to the authority and union of the United States of America, and to our glorious flag, under whose folds every Union soldier’s or sailor’s grave is the altar of patriotism.” The GAR would be one of the few postwar organizations that, as one black GAR member declared, “ignores the prejudice of race and regards as equally worthy all those who rendered the country service.”19

Likewise, the Northern Protestant evangelicals, who had so confidently anticipated a free-labor millennium at the end of the war, now retreated before the intellectual onslaught of Darwin and the “Social Darwinism” that so conveniently apologized for the social and economic inequities of American capitalism. Some, such as Dwight L. Moody and John Wanamaker, struggled to harmonize Christ and capitalism; others, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, rejected capitalism and evangelicalism in favor of a “Social Gospel” that would fight for the new urban masses as the abolitionists had once fought for the slaves; many more, such as Jonathan Blanchard of Wheaton, withdrew behind the private ramparts of what became known to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans as “fundamentalism” and dreamed of an apocalyptic solution for the complexities of their world. “It is one of the ruling ideas of the century that man is fully capable of self-government,” concluded one of the participants in the first important “fundamentalist” convention, the Niagara Bible Conference, in 1875. But “according to Scripture, all these hopes are doomed to disappointment. … Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, is written concerning modern democracies no less than concerning Babylon of old.” Evangelical Protestantism, which had acquired so massive a grip on public culture, now began a Napoleonic retreat to the fringes of that culture, abandoning all hope for transforming a world that had somehow gone beyond hope.20

The spectacle of President Johnson’s public combat with the Radical Republicans awoke defeated white Southerners to the realization that the Northern war effort was a coalition, not a monolithic anti-Southern movement, and that within the coalition, moderate and Radical Republicans, War Democrats, abolitionists, free blacks, and colonizationists stood together mainly because the South had forced them to an inalterable choice between the Union and slavery. Some parts of this coalition were quite satisfied once the Union had been secured, and cared little or nothing about the future of African Americans.

It was the genius of the Redeemers to realize that the path toward the restoration of white supremacy in the South lay in splitting that coalition. To that end the Redeemer governments advertised themselves as benign representatives of a “New South” who would relieve the North of the burden of Reconstruction and black civil rights, a burden which the Redeemers rightly suspected that most Northerners never really wanted to shoulder in the first place, and shouldered only because the only alternative to Reconstruction any of them knew was the slave regime of the old South. The “New South” mythology, which burst into full flower in the 1880s, worked to allay Northern concern that the abandonment of Reconstruction was tantamount to a reversal of Appomattox. They did so first by asserting that it was Southern concern for its unique sectional identity, and not slavery, that had been the cause of secession. “Slavery was not the ultimate or proximate cause of the war,” declared former Confederate general Richard Taylor, “and Abolitionists are not justified in claiming the glory and spoils of the conflict.”21

New South advocates then reassured Northerners that the South had learned its lesson about playing with secession and was willing to embrace the Northern economic order and judge itself by Northern standards. The first assertion allowed the New South partisans to suggest that race was not, after all, the main concern of the war; the second allowed them to suggest that the North and the Federal government could safely let the South govern its own affairs, political as well as racial. In his famous 1886 speech to the New England Society of New York City, Henry Grady, the thirty-six-year-old editor of the Atlanta Constitution, promised that when the New South “stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth,” it would understand “that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave armies beaten.” As Southerners reflected on the war, declared Grady, they were now “glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty hand and that … the American Union was saved from the wreck of war.”22

There were two serious problems with the New South image. One was that many Southerners were unwilling to make even this much of a concession for the