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

in the National Cemetery Lincoln had dedicated twenty-three years before. One elderly man in Battery B’s group, who had lost his son at Gettysburg, listened as the old battery mates stood by the boy’s grave and “praised his boy’s pleasant ways, genial, kindly disposition, and brave deeds.” The man was unconsoled. “My boy, my boy, O God, why did you take my boy? He was all I had,” he sobbed. It was one of wives of the ex-artillerymen who at last took the old man by the arm and turned him toward the flag on the cemetery flagstaff: “Your boy died for that flag, and while this nation endures his deeds will never be forgotten. When you and I are dead, patriots, standing where we are now, will remember his name and fame.” 42 It was a beautiful and quintessentially Victorian moment of nationalistic melodrama, but it underscores a point often missed in the terrible toll of the Civil War’s losses and shortfalls, and that is that the Republic survived.

Not only survived, but did so (largely in the North and the West) in the free-labor image that nineteenth-century liberals had hoped would triumph over the Romantic aristocrats. For all of the ravenous economic appetites of the corporations and the “modern barons,” large segments of the American economy remained the Elysium of small producers, household-based commercial agriculture, and Protestant moralism far into the twentieth century. Big business arrived after the Civil War, to the horror of veteran Republicans such as Garfield, but small business did not depart. Between 1869 and 1919, the average size of American plants and establishments involved in coal and oil shot up from 12 to 107, in rubber from 404 to 967, in machinery from 14 to 112; but in food services, the average size went only from 6 to 10, in chemicals from 10 to 19, in lumber from 6 to 18. In 1870, there were 22,000 flour milling plants in the United States; in 1900 there were 25,000. In cotton textiles, the increase was only from 819 establishments in 1870 to 1,055 in 1900. Even as the United States moved into first place among the world’s industrialized nations, the bulk of its population lived in places with fewer than 2,500 residents. Alongside the great new post–Civil War industrial behemoths—Armour, Swift, Pillsbury, Remington, Standard Oil, Pullman—and the pitched conflicts they generated between labor and capital in Martinsburg, Homestead, and Haymarket Square, the harmonious free-labor economy of Henry Clay, Henry Carey, and Abraham Lincoln, in which every man could still “make himself,” hummed complacently across the staggering breadth of the American republic.43

The nation possessed that breadth because it was united, undivided by sectionalism even if its unity was marred by racism. That unity, eight decades later, would be almost all that stood between civilization and the universal midnight of Nazism. The same unity, a hundred years later, would finally hear the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. summon a nation back to the unfinished work of justice and equality.

Whatever else the Civil War failed to accomplish, and whatever questions it left unanswered, there was at least this: what America would we live in, and what world would others live in, if the American republic had fragmented into two pieces—or maybe three, or even four and five pieces—in 1865? Or if the institution of slavery had survived, either in an independent Southern Confederacy or as the foundation of the new western states whose future had been Abraham Lincoln’s greatest concern? The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, reporting to Edwin Stanton in the spring of 1864, thought the alternatives to Union and emancipation were already too horrible to contemplate: trade wars, foreign intervention, petty dictatorships.

In such a state of feeling, under such a state of things, can we doubt the inevitable results? Shall we escape border raids after fleeing fugitives? No sane man will expect it. Are we to suffer these? We are disgraced! Are we to repel them? It is a renewal of hostilities! … In case of a foreign war … can we suppose that they will refrain from seeking their own advantage by an alliance with the enemy?44

Each year on September 17, the anniversary of the battle of Antietam, United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had been a lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts that day, received a red rose from his fellow justice Edward Douglass White, a former Confederate soldier from Louisiana whom Holmes joined on the Court when he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. It was the kind of sentimental gesture that Holmes appreciated and Frederick Douglass would have deplored. But Justice White had a point to make. “My God,” the old Confederate would mutter in palpable horror as he reflected on the war he had lost. “My God, if we had succeeded.”45

L’ENVOI

To thee, old Cause!

Thou peerless, passionate, good cause!

Thou stern, remorseless, sweet Idea!

Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands!

After a strange, sad war—great war for thee,

(I think all war through time was really fought, and ever will be really fought, for thee;)

These chants for thee—the eternal march of thee.

Thou orb of many orbs!

Thou seething principle! Thou well-kept, latent germ! Thou centre!

Around the idea of thee the strange sad war revolving,

With all its angry and vehement play of causes,

(With yet unknown results to come, for thrice a thousand years,)

These recitatives for thee—my Book and the War are one,

Merged in its spirit I and mine—as the contest hinged on thee,

As a wheel on its axis turns, this Book, unwitting to itself,

Around the Idea of thee.

—Walt Whitman46

FURTHER READING

ONE. A NATION ANNOUNCING ITSELF

Two magisterial, but very contradictory, surveys of the history of the early republic have been important for this chapter, Sean Wilentz’s Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). My understanding of the world context of the early republic’s economy has been shaped by my reading of