Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (96 page)

But all the same, not even the most optimistic New South propagandists could deny for long that the South remained an economic backwater—that its experiments in developing domestic steel and iron industries were a failure; that its networks of postwar textile mills were built on the exploitation of uprooted white workers, most of whom were women and children; that its lumbering industry mostly fed the commercial appetites of the North and left Southern hillsides waste and denuded. Southern per capita income in 1900 still stood at only half that of the rest of the nation.
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Above all, they could not deny the ugly fact of racial injustice. From the 1880s onward, the post-Reconstruction white governments grew unwilling to rely just on intimidation and violence to keep African Americans away from the ballot box and themselves in power, and turned instead to systematic legal disenfranchisement. Recognizing the close intersection of economic status and political power,
Southern state governments gradually imposed rigorous segregations of black and white, which ensured that blacks would occupy only the second-class railway cars, the scantiest institutes of education, and the bottom rung of the economic ladder. In the broadest sense, segregation apportioned the towns and the cities to whites and the fields to blacks, and bound blacks to an agricultural peonage—whether in the form of sharecropping or debt tenancy—that smothered the resourcefulness and economic potential of one-quarter of the Southern population. In the name of white supremacy, the South marginalized itself.
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Behind the facade of reconciliation and racial paternalism that the New Southers erected, there was far more common ground between the New South and the Lost Cause than either was eager to admit. The New South novelist Thomas Dixon freely admitted that “the Old South fought against the stars in their courses—the resistless tide of the rising consciousness of Nationality and World-Mission,” whereas “the young South greets the new era and glories in its manhood.” Yet Dixon also entertained notions of white supremacy that would have delighted the last Lost Causer: “This is a white man’s government, conceived by white men, and maintained by white men through every year of its history,—and by the God of our Fathers it shall be ruled by white men until the Arch-angel shall call the end of time!”
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Both New Southers and Lost Causers seized on Robert E. Lee and canonized him after his death in 1870 as a kind of Protestant saint. For the New Southers, Lee’s dignified surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia was a model of Christian fortitude in the face of disaster. His willingness in the years following Appomattox to help rebuild Washington College, a war-shattered Virginia educational institution, as the College’s first postwar president set yet another example of patience and hope. And in order to add charity to the lengthening list of Lee’s virtues, the New South promoters highlighted Lee’s repeated exhortations to young Virginian men to put the war behind them and to cultivate the arts of peace. All of these pieces of Lee’s character seemed to underscore the determination of the South to face the future as part of the reunited American nation.

Yet as much as Lee “avoided all discussion of political questions” in the years after Appomattox, he was privately unreconciled to black freedom and predicted that the United States was “sure to become aggressive abroad & despotic at home.” Lee also gave the Lost Cause an answer to its most besetting question, which was why, if the Southern armies really had contained what Pollard called the better men, God had let the South lose to the grasping, mercenary, and infidel Northerners. In Lee, the Lost Cause found a solution, for Lee’s courageous and humble bearing showed them that suffering might be a nobler calling than victory, and that the South could claim
through Lee that it had surrendered not to superior political morality but only to superior numbers.
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These confusions of meaning and disappointment of intentions help to explain why the Civil War occupies so small a space in American high culture. The American Civil War never gave birth to a national epic, an American
War and Peace
, and with the exception of Stephen Crane’s psychological 1895 novella
The Red Badge of Courage
(based on the battle of Chancellorsville) and Ambrose Bierce’s frighteningly bitter short stories, America’s major prose writers in the postwar period passed the Civil War by on the other side. Although the published output of Civil War–related novels and stories is fairly considerable, their strength lies in their sheer quantity rather than their quality.

The closest one comes in American literature to a frank appreciation of the War occurs, not in the writings of the Northern victors, but in the galaxy of great twentieth-century Southern novelists, from William Faulkner to Walker Percy. These authors succeeded largely because they finally came to terms with the poisonous role that race has played in the construction of a Southern mentality. Race was the great ulcer of the Southern innards, wrote Walker Percy, the South’s unending shirt of flame,

and hasn’t it always been that way ever since the first tough God-believing, Christhaunted, cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man, the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because sooner or later the first would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly Visigoth-Western-Gentile- Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall out, turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.
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By contrast, the heavier artillerists of Northern literature fled from the war and from race: Clemens, Harte, Henry James, and Sarah Orne Jewett can all be read without much suspicion that they had lived through an immense national crisis, or any inkling at all that it had something to do with race.

American poets, meanwhile, seemed moved by the war only for the production of banality, such as John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie” in
In War Time
(1864), with its melodramatic confrontation of the old flag-waving widow and the somber “Stonewall” Jackson:

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,

Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred

To life at that woman’s deed and word:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
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or Thomas Buchanan Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride”:

Up from the South at break of day,

Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,

The affrighted air with a shudder bore,

Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain’s door,

The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,

Telling the battle was on once more,

And Sheridan twenty miles away.
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Walt Whitman, alone among the American poets of the Civil War era, managed to write wartime verse in
Drum-Taps
(1865) and
Sequel to Drum-Taps
(1865–66) capable of piercing the facade of romance and glory without indulging either a cheap pacifism or a maniacal vengeance. Not until the 1920s did Stephen Vincent Benét come the closest of any American poet to creating, in
John Brown’s Body
(which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929), an
Iliad
for the Civil War. Similarly, Civil War–related art rarely rose above the technical level of newspaper illustration, and only a handful of genuinely extraordinary paintings from Winslow Homer, Xanthus R. Smith, Conrad Wise Chapman, and Gilbert Gaul are available to compete with the far vaster output of American artwork on the urban North and the cowboy West.
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The single greatest collection of cultural artifacts tossed up by the war is its popular music and lyrics, and many of the Civil War’s tunes—Daniel Emmett’s “Dixie,” Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” George Root’s “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” Patrick Gilmore’s “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and Henry Clay Work’s “Marching Through Georgia” and the rollicking “Kingdom Comin’”— are still so sturdy and recognizable that they instantly conjure up associations with the Civil War. But once the war’s own music is left behind, very little rises in its track. Charles Ives toyed with Civil War melodic fragments and worked “The Battle Cry of Freedom” into a particularly heart-rending moment in his
Three Places in New England
; Aaron Copland set the words of Lincoln against the heroic background of what has become one of the chestnuts of Fourth of July concerts,
A Lincoln Portrait
(1942). Beyond that, only a handful of occasional pieces—a stray symphony here (Roy Harris’s
Gettysburg Symphony
), a choral arrangement there (in that last resort of all high-school music directors, Peter J. Wilhousky’s setting of the
Battle Hymn of the Republic
)—even notice the Civil War. No
Eroica
, no
Wozzeck
, no
War Requiem
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Ironically, the most recurrent artistic shape that the Civil War took was statuary, some of it—like 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.”
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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).
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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.”
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