Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (75 page)

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.
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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. …”
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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.
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The fall of 1863 gave Lincoln a perfect opportunity to articulate that understanding of the war when the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, following the battle at Gettysburg, arranged for the reburial of Gettysburg dead in a new cemetery at the center of the battlefield. Lincoln was invited by the organizers to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” at the dedication ceremonies in Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. He was not the featured speaker—that honor went to the former president of Harvard, Edward Everett, who launched into an oration two and a half hours long—and he needed to do no more in his remarks than is done when a bottle of champagne is cracked over a ship’s bow at its launch. He was respectful enough of the scope of that assignment to limit himself to only 272 words. In those words, Lincoln nevertheless managed to justify the ways of democracy more eloquently than anyone, then or now.
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Lincoln reached in his first sentence to the Declaration of Independence for authority: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” By “equal” he meant not a predetermined result but rather an equal starting point in the eyes of law and government, a common point from which any man could make himself. The idea that a nation could be founded on a
proposition
was ludicrous to the Romantic reactionaries of nineteenth-century Europe, and they were not reluctant to point to the Civil War as proof that attempting to build a government around something as bloodless and logical as a proposition was futile.
Lincoln accepted that challenge: the war indeed would be the test of whether “that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure,” or whether democracies, wobbling around on the stilts of a proposition about equality, were doomed to self-destruction the moment a sizable minority decided it had no desire to abide by the will of a majority’s decision. The sacrifices of Gettysburg, Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chancellorsville, and a hundred other places demonstrated otherwise, that men would die rather than lose hold of that proposition. Reflecting on that dedication, the living should themselves experience a new birth of freedom, a determination—and he drove his point home with a deliberate evocation of the great Whig orator Daniel Webster—“that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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The Republican newspapers heartily applauded it: the address was a “brief but immortal speech,” editorialized John W. Forney’s
Philadelphia Press
. The Democratic papers, predictably, spurned it as “mere trash” and “unworthy of comment.”
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Southern intellectuals had a very different task: to demonstrate that the South really was a cultural world unto itself. Offering up the proof of a unique Southern cultural identity would make it easier to justify a separate Southern political regime, and that would build consensus behind the battle lines and shore up popular support for the Confederate government, even when that government undertook policy initiatives, from military conscription to economic nationalization, which seemed to contradict the immediate reasons the Southern states had seceded from the Union in the first place. By discovering and revealing the outlines of a distinctively Southern culture, Confederate intellectuals would create the rock around which the changing tides of war would splash in vain.

They certainly had the appetite for this task. Although the South had fewer resources to support them and fewer magazines and quarterlies for platforms, an intellectual network based on James Henry Hammond and William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, Henry Hughes of Mississippi, Josiah Clark Nott of Alabama, and the Virginians Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, Thomas Roderick Dew, George Fitzhugh, and George Frederick Holmes provided the backbone of Southern intellectual life. It also embraced the novelists Augusta Jane Evans, Caroline Gilman, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (the uncle of Confederate general James Longstreet), and John Pendleton Kennedy, the poets Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Hamilton Hayne. Their writing crowded into the four principal Southern journals, the
Southern Quarterly Review, DeBow’s Review
, the
Southern Literary Messenger
, and the
Southern Review
.
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Southern intellectuals tapped the energy of a long-festering resentment at the condescension shown them in the prewar decades by Northern publishers and editors. “The true gentleman was educated at a Northern college, wore clothing made at the North or imported by the North, employed a Northern teacher, male or female, listened to a Yankee parson, and read Northern books, magazines and newspapers,” complained
DeBow’s Review
in the heady summer of 1861. “We have been in a state of pupilage, and never learned to walk alone.” If only Southerners would shake off this Yankee-induced “pupilage,” they would realize that they actually possessed a distinct and self-defining culture of their own. This culture was built upon the fundamental (and Romantic) realization that nations are made not by adherence to propositions but by the cultivation of an ineluctable but palpable national character.
⁷⁵

The great error of the Enlightenment was that (as Thomas Dew explained in 1853) in their enthusiasm for reason, “the philosophers and encyclopaedists published their theories and principles without daring to apply them. … Their investigations, consequently, became eminently
Utopian
. Every principle was pushed out to its greatest extent,—the speculation of the philosopher was not hampered at each step by the difficulty of practical application. These abstract speculations were like theoretic mechanics, who sit in their closets and contemplate diagrams and figures, representing levers, pulleys, &c, with all the accuracy of mathematic precision.” The result, of course, was that when “the French revolution came, and the evils of government were at last to be corrected, unfortunately for France, there was nothing but this Utopian philosophy to shed light on the path of the revolution,” and the result was not government of, by or for the people, but the Reign of Terror.
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Rather than worship reason, Southerners “accept as true the faith of our fathers, believe in the authority of the Bible, attested by the voice of the civilized world for almost two thousand years; heed and respect the lessons of history, ancient and profane, and pursue no Utopias that promise to change man’s nature, his social habitudes, and his inequalities of condition, because we believe in nature and in nature’s God.” Societies could never be built from the sort of grasping, advantage-calculating individuals who populated the North. “The world has seen many instances of governments devised on theoretical principles, mainly with a view to the security of equal rights,” wrote Nathaniel Beverly Tucker of the College of William & Mary, but “how these have succeeded, history and the present abject condition of those countries which were the subjects of those experiments, show but too plainly.” The true basis of society was the community, not the individual and the individual’s
rights. “One of the principal ends of the establishment of government is to provide, in the collective responsibility of the whole, a substitute for the responsibility of the individual. …”
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Still, Southern intellectuals stalled on the same fundamental issue that had dogged Southern society from the start: slavery. Was slavery of the essence of the South, woven into the warp and woof of its cultural fabric so completely that any description of the South must also be a description of the slave system? Or was slavery merely an economic accident, a superficial aspect of a more profound, underlying organism of Southern culture? The intellectuals’ answer, surprisingly, was the latter. “The differences between the Northern and Southern portions of the former American Union never involved a moral question,” declared
DeBow’s Review
in that same midsummer issue of 1861; “these and all former issues are now dead.” James Henley Thornwell, the prince among Southern Presbyterian theologians, stood among slavery’s most ardent defenders right up to the point of secession, but in 1861, he began to express doubts about slavery that he would never have permitted to see daylight in earlier times. Thornwell told his friend and biographer, Benjamin Palmer, that “he had made up his mind to move… for the gradual emancipation of the negro, as the only measure that would give peace to the country.”
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If slavery was not the South’s cultural trademark, what was? Was there really such a thing as Southernness? Oddly, no one seemed more convinced that there was than the soldiers of the Union armies. Much as they had enlisted to preserve a common America, the deeper they marched into the South, the more it really did seem to resemble a foreign country. “It is vain to deny that the slave system of labor is giving shape to the government of the society where it exists, and that that government is not republican either in form or spirit,” exclaimed the abolitionist general John W. Phelps. “It was through this system that the leading conspirators sought to fasten upon the people an aristocracy or a despotism; and it is not sufficient that they should be merely defeated in their object and the country be rid of their rebellion.” The rank and file felt much the same way. “The papers used to talk a great deal about Union people in Virginia, and their love for their country,” wrote one soldier in the 5th Maine, but “it never happened to be our fortune to see any of those exceptions to Southern character. … Possibly this may seem a hard statement, but it is not so hard as was the reality.” So at just the moment when Southerners wanted to claim culture rather than slavery as the basis of Confederate identity, Northerners were moving
in precisely the opposite direction and holding Southerners to their prewar word that the protection of slavery was its guiding star.
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In pursuit of a Southern national culture, Confederates invented new national emblems (the Confederate great seal featured an image of George Washington’s statue in Richmond and the pious motto
Deo vindice
, “God will vindicate”), a new grammar (through defiantly Confederate school textbooks such as the
Confederate Primer
[1861], the
First
and
Second Confederate Speller
[1861],
Boys and Girls Stories of the War
[1863], and the
Dixie Primer for the Little Folks
[1863]), new popular music (“God Save the South,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” “The Southrons’ Chaunt of Defiance,” “Stonewall Jackson’s Way,” “General Lee’s Grand March”), art (William D. Washington’s
The Burial of Latané
), anthologies of poetry (William Shepperson’s
War Songs of the South
), histories (Edward Pollard’s
The First Year of the War
and its successive “years” through 1864), and novels (Augusta Jane Evans’s
Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice
).
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This represents a remarkable volume of effort, even if Southerners themselves were dubious of its quality. “In this Titanic struggle which is going on, the genial pursuit of letters is at an end, and for nearly three years little has appeared which is worthy either of the genius or attainments of our people,” J. D. B. DeBow sighed. “The glorious struggle has scarcely inspired one song which will live beyond the generation that now burns with martial ardor and rushes to the deadly field.” But as in the failure of Confederate political nationhood, it was the war that proved the principal block to Confederate cultural nationhood. The grinding demands of the war and the blockade, Northern occupation of the Southern heartland, and the disruptions in supplies of paper, ink, type, pens, and books had all hampered the exercise of a Confederate imagination, and the looming shadow of defeat meant that any hope of delineating a Southern national character in its literature or culture would need to rely on time and experimentation.
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