Our War
On a business trip to Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1998, I found myself on one of the streets radiating outward from the old state capitol. As I glanced at the capitol from a long distance, a tall column caught my attention. Upon that column was an armed figure with an erect and manly bearing. Even from afar, his outward form could not be mistaken for anything but a representation of a Confederate soldier; martial valor was the message. I uneasily scanned the pedestrians up and down the street, seeking the faces of my fellow citizens who had the most right to take offense at this statue. They were there, going about their business peacefully, as if they were in any other American city. In my mind was a thought best captured by Ulysses S. Grant, that Southerners had fought “long and valiantly” for a cause that was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”1
Years later, I left business, became a political scientist, and began studies that have led to this book. On a sunny day in the late summer of 2008, I was in Boston for an academic conference and decided to use my free time visiting the city’s colonial- and revolutionary-era sites. I especially wanted to visit the Boston Public Garden and Boston Common, the central point of American republicanism, where our patriot fathers assembled in defiance of monarchic rule. Approaching on foot, I paused as if struck by a thunderbolt. Rising above everything else, above the magnificent figure of Washington on horseback, was a monument of an altogether different character from the one I remembered in Raleigh, and the sight of it caught me unaware. Although I had known nothing about the existence of this monument, from afar I instantly knew what it was, stopped walking, was overcome, and had to turn my face away.
For a long time after Aristotle made politics a distinct field of study, it was generally recognized that the first and most important duty of a political scientist was to identify clearly the parts and the whole of a given political society, especially who rules and by what ruling principle. This is sometimes a very difficult task. We must try to know the animating principle of the whole, the relationship of the whole and the parts, when and where the whole and the parts are coming together into greater concord, and when and where the parts are breaking away, like eddies that force a change in the direction of a river’s current, are split off into a new channel, or are reabsorbed into the main flow of the river, strengthening it. This is what all political societies do. The payoff of becoming deeply immersed in these studies is that we can recognize meaning in small details, even in aesthetics, that have been touched by organizing principles at work within the enveloping political society.
For several years I had been immersing myself deeply enough in studies of the Civil War era that the minds and hearts of that past generation had become familiar to me. It was clear that what rose before me was a production of that generation, sprung from America’s republican cradle. Not a valorous soldier but a woman stands at the pinnacle of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Boston Common. Her posture expresses an otherworldly beauty, tenderness, and solemnity. She wears a crown of thirteen stars and cradles the American flag with one arm and with the other a drawn sword, point turned downward. This is no Winged Victory, with head held high. Rather, she gazes slightly below her, sorrowfully regarding her many lost sons from Boston. You will not find the thrill of conquest here or the commemoration of martial valor as an end in itself, but something higher, the commemoration of a hard-won peace and the vindication of America’s founding principle, the honorable end to which they dedicated their martial valor.
While preparing the manuscript for this book, I learned that the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston was dedicated on Constitution Day, September 17, 1877, in an elaborate ceremony and after extensive efforts that began immediately after the conclusion of the war. When I read the remarks of keynote speaker Charles Devens, they did not surprise me. His remarks run parallel to the thesis of this book and the aesthetic character of the monument. “This is no Monument to the glories of war,” he said. “Nor is this a Monument to valor only.” These were not the self-serving words of a politician whose valor was never tested. Devens spoke as a combat veteran, one who had received multiple wounds in Civil War battles and had earned a general command. Yet with moderation and magnanimity, he discouraged “boasting or unseemly exultation” over the rebels and instead focused his audience on the nature of the cause for which he and the Massachusetts men had staked their courage.2
They fought so that “the government they had lived under might be preserved, and that the just and equal rights of all men might be maintained.” The war “was not a mere conflict of dynasties, or of families, like the English Wars of the Roses.” Such wars of succession change the ruling house, but not the system of government. In the Wars of the Roses, the Houses of York and Lancaster contended for control of the throne that would remain supreme over England’s monarchic society, no matter which victor occupied the throne. Rather, our American Civil War “was a great elemental conflict, in which two opposite systems of civilization were front to front and face to face.” By defeating the Confederacy, Devens and his comrades had emancipated “the subject race from slavery and the dominant race itself from the corrupting influence of this thraldom.” To Devens, slavery’s evil effect extended beyond the harm done to the liberty of the slave to include all members of political society. Therefore, Union victory was a victory for all Americans, everywhere, even in the defeated South: “I should think the victory won by these men who have died in its defence barren, if it shall not prove in every larger sense won for the South as well as the North.”3 From his perspective, the war had rescued the South, though devastating its lands and costing it many lives.
The passages of Devens’s address that receive special attention in this book are the allusions to the struggle between “opposite systems of civilization” and to slavery’s evil effect. The effects of slavery and the division of the nation into two “opposite systems of civilization” are causally linked. Devens and his contemporaries understood that slavery’s existence transformed the character of political society, wherever slavery took root and increased. That transformed political society, or political regime, developed in a direction that deviated from the path established by the American founding fathers.
The character of the inchoate regime increasingly differed from the other, until they were two fully formed regimes, and the two could no longer remain united or at peace. The difference between these two warring regimes became so sharp that they appeared to be “opposite systems of civilization,” though both were American, geographically speaking. But if the defining antecedent of “American” is the American founding, then only one side in this war was “American.” Devens’s commemoration of Boston’s war dead intended to honor the men for restoring the founding fathers’ republican liberty in the South and for securing its preservation in the whole.
Initially, the South eschewed speeches, pomp, grand ceremony, and monuments commemorating its part in the war. Southern ladies’ associations took care to bury their war dead in simple cemeteries, and that was all.4 Defeat presents itself as an obvious explanation for Southern reluctance to honor their dead more conspicuously than they did, but the unpopularity of the war within the Southern soldiering class and their families is a complementary explanation. In contrast, the soldiering class in the Union remained loyal, though they, too, were badly mauled and bloodied. White Union regiments were drawn from nine of the eleven seceding states that formed the Confederacy, the exceptions being Georgia, which supplied a battalion, and South Carolina, whereas, not counting the cleft border states, no Confederate regiments were drawn from any state remaining in the Union.5 Desertion crippled the Confederate army, and some scholars now attribute the Confederacy’s military defeat to this cause.6 But in the 1864 presidential election, the Union army rejected McClellan and the prospect of a negotiated peace with the Confederacy and instead voted to reelect Lincoln and the certain continuation of the war in which they were dying—and they voted for Lincoln in higher proportion than the civilian public.7
The unpopularity of the war within the Southern soldiering class, that is, among ordinary Southerners, was not a surprise to contemporaries.8 In his 1877 address Devens hinted at the reason. Long before the war the bulk of the men who filled Confederate armies had lost the liberty won for them by their revolutionary fathers and had become a ruled class under their state governments, due to the baneful effect of slavery. For these ordinary Southerners, a prospective Union victory was a victory for them, and their desertions and defections to the Union army suggest that many knew or felt this and voted with their feet.
Just a few years before the war, a son of North Carolina published an infamous criticism of antebellum Southern government, and its vituperation rivaled anything that the most radical Northerner had ever dared to utter. Well known to all in his generation, Hinton Helper lamented the overthrow of the republican principles of the Southern fathers—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry—and claimed that government based upon their principles existed only in the free states of the North. Helper deprecated the oppression doled out to common white Southerners outside the planter class and placed the blame squarely upon the effect of slavery.9 Unsurprisingly, in North Carolina during the war, unionism was strong among these subjugated whites, and Confederate state authorities visited bloody reprisals upon them in response.10 In his postbellum speech, Devens alluded to the same analysis and judgment, as published by Helper and by many others before and after the war.
But Helper not only hated slavery, the cause of this oppression; he also hated the enslaved.11 The slaves’ eventual enfranchisement begins to explain why the Confederate monument on the Raleigh capitol grounds was raised and still stands today. The monument honoring the common Confederate soldier might have been a most peculiar proposition immediately after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, due to the unpopularity of the war among those whom the monument honored. But in 1867 a new phase of legislation in Congress known as congressional Reconstruction began and provided a strong pretext for ordinary Southerners to change their opinions about the North and the war. The legislation intended, as Devens said, to secure “the just and equal rights of all men,” including the millions of emancipated slaves. The unintended effect of congressionally mandated civil and political equality, as intelligent Southerners explained, was the creation of the solid South—the eventual unity between the poor white ruled class that Helper previously defended and the white ruling class that Helper previously attacked, brought together by common opposition to the equality of freedmen.12 Now, in retrospect, all white Southerners could regard the Confederate fight against Northerners in a more favorable light than they previously did.
By 1883 the people of Raleigh began to hear proposals to honor the Confederacy. Inflamed by Union memorials that he saw in Boston, Captain Samuel A’Court Ashe, a veteran of the Confederate army, returned home to Raleigh and campaigned for proper shrines and monuments. In 1895 thirty thousand people greeted the unveiling of the Confederate monument on the state capitol grounds and warmly received an address by another Confederate veteran from the officer class, Alfred Moore Waddell.13 His address joined a growing chorus in the South, poignantly memorializing the “Lost Cause,” a reinterpretation of the Civil War that attributed its origin to Northerners’ unconstitutional aggression against states’ rights. He erased antebellum Southern statesmen’s open break from the American founding fathers and made the founders and Confederates seem to be in alignment. He erased the central significance of slavery and the prominent and politically embarrassing memory of antebellum antagonism between ruling whites and ruled whites in the South.14
Thus, the political character of the antebellum South, surveyed by North Carolinian Hinton Helper, began to recede behind thickets of politically convenient revisionism, woven by men like North Carolinians Ashe and Waddell. A few Southerners persisted in acknowledging that past and the cause of their forgetfulness. After having served as an officer in the Confederate army, then as a U.S. representative from Alabama and secretary of the U.S. Navy, Hilary Herbert wrote in 1913, “The Negro and the ‘carpet-bagger’ had compelled the whites to forget their animosities and come together to save their civilization. Hence the Solid South.”15 Indeed, in a speech in the Raleigh capitol in 1909, Ashe decried “the saturnalia of Reconstruction” and praised “full restoration of Anglo-Saxon control” and “undying opposition to those who would destroy their civilization.”16 But the old civilization’s antebellum animosities between ruled and ruling whites never entered his speech. Ashe and others continued to push the revisionist account of the antebellum South and the Civil War, and such men did successfully alter how Americans understood the past and themselves. By 1928 the Raleigh News and Observer reported that Ashe’s “different view of the Civil War . . . has won the praise of leading New England historians and educators as well as that of [Massachusetts] Governor Fuller.”17 And so layers of misinterpretation clouded our memory of the past, aided by Americans’ desire to regenerate their Union.18 An era of forgetfulness commenced in America.
Forty years after the birth of American liberty, a race of kings arose from American soil. They sprouted wherever the institution of slavery was planted, like the warriors in Greek legend who sprouted from dragons’ teeth sown into the soil of Colchis. Over time, these kingly men compacted with one another, repudiated the lofty principles of their nation’s birth, acquired rule over most of the landmass of the United States, and finally aspired to install themselves as permanent suzerains over a great empire, whether within the American Union or outside of it, it mattered not to them, except as a question of expediency. The causes of our Civil War and the difficulties of Reconstruction originate in their rise.
Nobody suffered more for this political revolution against the principles of the American founding than Southerners themselves, both white and especially black. Nobody did more to bequeath the principles of the American founding to us than the men Devens honored at the foot of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston, on Constitution Day 1877. These men, utterly unpracticed at war, picked up their rifles, donned Union blue, and saved the achievements of our patriot fathers from a premature and inglorious end, for Southerners as well as Northerners and for the world.
Present-day Americans are far more likely to know the battles of the Civil War and the wise aphorisms of Lincoln than to comprehend fully the dire course of events that those battles and his wisdom arrested. We tend to be very well aware of important aspects of the period—of the enslavement of millions of Americans, of the results of the Civil War generation’s incomplete work during Reconstruction, of the subsequent torments and discrimination that afflicted our fellow citizens and their ancestors. We puzzle over these evils in our history, forgetting the behemoth that was the source of these evils and forgetting that the behemoth would have done worse and trampled on freedom for all, reducing millions more to political vassalage and slavery, if not for the men Devens honored. We are situated somewhat like children who have forgotten or never knew a heroic parent’s sacrifices, skill, and determination that saved us from a desolation that never came. They afforded us the luxury of our blithe forgetfulness. Today we are a prosperous and free people and can barely imagine the dark reign of tyranny, adapted for modernity, that we and other people of the world might have inherited, had they not firmly prosecuted the war to its conclusion.
But they understood the nature of the struggle in which they were engaged. At Gettysburg Lincoln said as much. Liberty was in retreat; aristocracy and monarchy were in the van. The last hope for free government in the world was the rump Union, stretching from Maine to Minnesota, from Canada to the Ohio River, plus the states of Oregon, California, and Kansas. Europeans understood this as well, and the powerful enemies of republican liberty pensively watched our unfolding epic and considered intervention. When British Liberal and Oxford professor Goldwin Smith visited Boston, he warned the New Englanders, “You are fighting . . . for Democracy against Aristocracy; and this fact is thoroughly understood by both parties throughout the Old World. . . . [T]he sympathy . . . of the Aristocratic party you cannot claim.”19 Americans in government were aware of “the trans-Atlantic sympathy of royalty and the nobility with the South” and were aware too that our war would “convulse the Governments of all Europe” and would “arouse the passions and excite the prejudices of classes and factions always inimical to our great example and experiment.” They warily braced for news of European arms reinforcing Southern armies.20 The contending aristocratic and democratic parties in Europe knew that the issue of our war determined whether the weight of a young and powerful continent would be thrown on the scales of history for them or against them.21 If Britain entered the field in support of the Confederacy, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward vowed, “We will wrap the whole world in flames.”22 Our war narrowly escaped becoming an international war, a first world war, fought to preserve or destroy the hope of free government, in view of our doorsteps and not in faraway Europe.
We have forgotten the high stakes of the contest to which Lincoln’s speech referred. When summoned by events to save us, who are their posterity, our white and black fathers stood at post and paid the unspeakable price. Their harvest of woes, their awareness of their grave legacy and their stewardship of our welfare were addressed by James Doolittle of Wisconsin in early 1864 on the floor of the United States Senate when the end of the carnage was yet beyond their horizon. On that day the Senate was embroiled in debate and Doolittle was speaking. Just then, interrupting the proceedings, a “great corps d’armée” of the Union passed outside their windows, heading out “to engage,” he observed, “in the greatest battle this continent or the world has seen for two generations.” Within earshot of the tramping divisions, Doolittle pivoted, urging his colleagues to set aside divisive policy questions which were moot until victory was secured. He reminded the Senate that upon the results of that battle and our war, “hang not only the hopes of this Republic, but the hopes of the world,” and acknowledged that England and France might still “take sides against us.” Come what may, Doolittle exhorted them to press on and complete the destruction of America’s rising and rebellious oligarchy. The result of their “gigantic struggle” would “determine whether republican government shall live or die; whether a constitutional government, resting upon the people for its support, can be maintained, or must perish forever.” For the sake of “generations to come after us,” it was necessary that they gather “our forces from the East and from the West,” and pour out “our men, our blood, our treasure. . .all we of this generation have and all we hope to have” – even their own sons:
Our country at this hour is bleeding at every pore; every household wears the drapery of mourning; grief is an unwelcome visitor at every fireside; an unbidden guest fills the vacant chair at every family table, and, by the side of the mourning widow or mother, bends, in anguish, deep and unutterable, at every family altar. Sir, some of us have been made to drink of this bitter cup; there are some, like my honorable friend from Maine, [Mr. Fessenden] and myself, who have been compelled to look into the graves of our sons, fallen a sacrifice to put down this unholy rebellion. And, sir, we have been made to feel, in our inmost souls, what our judgments clearly see, that the great issue of this people and specially of this present time, and before which all others should give place, is an issue of arms—whether we shall have success or whether we shall fail in crushing the military power of the rebellion.
Shall the Republic live or die? We not only know but we are made to feel that if we do not succeed in maintaining this Government and putting down this rebellion—and that can only be done by force of arms—our sons have been sacrificed in vain. But if we shall succeed, as, with the blessing of Providence, I hope and trust we may; if we shall be permitted to see that standard, under which they entered the service, float once more in triumph, with not one star obscured nor one stripe erased, over every inch of the soil of every State and Territory of the United States, we can then say to our struggling hearts, “Peace, be still! though our sons have fallen our country lives.”23
The American Republic prevailed. The nation could then begin the arduous and prolonged work of smoothing out the rebellious element that was anomalous to its republican nature and, in worldwide contests yet to come, could become a defender and not an assailant of liberty.