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

Augustus St. Gaudens’s memorial on Boston Common to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts—work of tremendous emotion and real genius. But by and large, the Civil War monument has been treated more as a joke than a genre. Along the same lines, the dearth of great Civil War fiction has never been overshadowed by the immense production of Civil War regimental histories, a quirky and revealing species of non-fiction with a virtually unique place in American letters, but one which American literary critics have yet to notice. Even Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962), the most famous study of American Civil War–related literature, makes no allusion to the regimental histories that blossomed in far greater numbers after the 1880s than the novels and memoirs upon which he lavished so much attention.

Balanced off against these losses was at least one victory, and that was over slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, followed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, and enforced by the Union armies, nailed down the coffin lid on what had always been the most egregious and shameful self-contradiction in American life. But once the war was over, the soft tidal return of racial mythologies robbed emancipation and abolition of their ambitious meanings. In time, people would disgustedly conclude that these had never had any meaning in the first place—that Lincoln was merely a closet racist, that abolition counted for nothing in the absence of economic equality, and that white Northerners too quickly gave up on an “abolition war” for black freedom in order to embrace a painless reunion with their unrepentant foes.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the greatest black writer after Frederick Douglass, was born free, in Massachusetts, in 1868, so segregation, rather than slavery, was the evil that bulked on the horizons of his experience. And the freedom he experienced seemed so hemmed in by racial humiliation that when he published his history of Reconstruction in 1935, he could only conclude that white Northerners had “never meant to abolish Negro slavery, because its profits were built on it,” and only decided to “fight for freedom since this preserved cotton, tobacco, sugar and the Southern market.” All the palaver about emancipation was simply cant for seducing African Americans into fighting the Union’s battles. “Life, Light and Leading for the slaves” would come only “under a dictatorship of the proletariat.”34

Du Bois was not the only scoffer at emancipation and the Union. Lurking within the snarky contempt of Henry Adams for Ulysses Grant was a Progressive snob’s loathing for the ramshackle inefficiencies of democracy, and the idea that 640,000 Americans had died merely to keep such a democracy from imploding seemed so pointless as to cry out for a more sinister explanation. That was the explanation supplied by the Progressives, by Charles and Mary Beard, by Louis Hacker, and by Du Bois as well. At the end of the war, “neither the hopes of the emancipators nor the fears of their opponents were realized,” said the Beards in 1921. And why? Because the true purpose of the war was to make the United States into “an industrial and commercial nation following in the footsteps of Great Britain,” where “the power of capital, both absolute and as compared to land, was to increase by leaps and bounds … positively sustained by protective tariffs that made the hopes of Alexander Hamilton seem trivial.” Beard’s single-track economic determinism has long since lost its luster. But it has left a pervasive sense that the actual (and ignoble) outcomes of the war fell far, far short of justifying its costs. If the Civil War was fought for emancipation, then it must have been a failure, because mere emancipation, by itself, accomplished so little; if the Civil War had been fought to save the republic, then it was a success, but a success so vapid as not to be worth having (or at least not at that cost).35

But “mere” freedom was not looked upon quite so lightly by the freedpeople themselves. When Lincoln’s carriage passed a brigade of black soldiers supporting the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864, they broke ranks and jubilantly surrounded Lincoln’s entourage with shouts of “Hurrah for the Liberator, Hurrah for the President.” The black wartime correspondent Thomas Morris Chester watched Lincoln pass through the joyful crowds of Richmond’s blacks, and wrote: “The colored population was wild with enthusiasm. Old men thanked God in a very boisterous manner, and old women shouted upon the pavement as high as they ever had done at a religious revival. … Even then they thought [freedom] must be a pleasant dream, but when they saw Abraham Lincoln they were satisfied that their freedom was perpetual. One enthusiastic old negro woman exclaimed: ‘I know that I am free, for I have seen father Abraham and felt him.’” Lincoln was extolled (in Shakespearean terms he would have appreciated) after his death at a freedmen’s memorial tribute in Washington as the “dearest friend, the kindest man, as President, we ever knew,” and thirty years later, the Negro Literary and Historical Society of Atlanta held up emancipation as “that day, when the clear and happy light of freedom dawned upon our midnight sky of slavery.”36

There were white Northerners, too, who clung resolutely to the visions they had seen written in burnished rows of steel. The Grand Army of the Republic angrily rejected all the appeals for reconciliation issued by the New Southers and energetically condemned the defiant hostility of the Lost Cause. They harshly criticized public displays of the Confederate flag, resisting any attempt to transform its meaning into a national symbol, and when the GAR began to suspect in the 1890s that schoolbook publishers were toning down their accounts of the Civil War to accommodate Southern views and promote Southern sales, the Union veterans mounted a campaign to bring its gray-haired members into public school classes to tell the story of the war as they had experienced it. Schoolbooks “treat the war as a contest