Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (97 page)

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 between the sections of our country known as North and South, and not as a war waged by the Government for the suppression of rebellion against National authority and meant to destroy National existence.” The casual reader “would not be able to distinguish between the patriotism of those who fought to save the Union and those who fought to destroy it,” much less to see in Confederate “patriotism” the protection of “slavery with its multiple of horrors.”
³⁷

Other veterans’ groups kept nailing the flag of emancipation to the mast as fast as the Lost Causers could tear it down. The Society of the Army of the Tennessee described the war as a struggle “that involved the life of the Nation, the preservation of the Union, the triumph of liberty and the death of slavery.” They had “fought every battle … from the firing upon the Union flag at Fort Sumter to the surrender of Lee at Appomattox … in the cause of human liberty,” burying “treason and slavery in the Potter’s Field of nations” and “making all our citizens equal before the law, from the gulf to the lakes, and from ocean to ocean.” In 1937, when the United Confederate Veterans extended an invitation to the GAR to join it in what amounted to the last great Blue and Gray Reunion at Gettysburg, the ninety-year-old veterans at the GAR’s 71st Encampment in Madison, Wisconsin, were adamant that no displays of the Confederate battle flag be permitted. “No rebel colors,” they shouted. “What sort of compromise is that for Union soldiers but hell and damnation.”
³⁸

But there was an even greater victory to remember, although it was a victory so thoroughgoing that it has become easy for subsequent generations to take it for granted, or even to discount it as a poor companion to emancipation, and that was the survival of the Union, and with it, liberal democracy in the nineteenth century.
Goldwin Smith, on tour in America in 1864, said, “An English liberal comes here, not only to watch the unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own. … Your regeneration, when it is achieved, will set forth the regeneration of the European nations.” If a liberal democratic republic as successful as the American one had been turned on itself and fractured from pressures it had created, the rejoicing from every crowned head, every dictator, and every princeling would be heard around the planet. Certainly those crowned heads saw that this was the ultimate stake in the war. This is why so many of them were rooting for the Confederacy.
³⁹

It was also the principal reason why Frederick Douglass could never write off the war as casually as Du Bois would. Douglass, who fought virtually to his dying day in 1895 to keep the eyes of Americans fixed firmly on his vision of a war that had been fought for freedom and not just the Union, was just as firm in his insistence that achieving freedom would have had precious little significance unaccompanied by preservation of the Union. The two wars were so intertwined that no war for slavery could have succeeded without the war for the Union, and no war for the Union could have succeeded without becoming a war to end slavery. Like Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union,” the white veterans remembered their war as being for both union and emancipation, one and inseparable. “We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle,” Douglass declared in 1871, “and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.” He would have nothing of it.

I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my “right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict. If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans, which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed, and mutilated, which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves, and planted agony at a million hearthstones—I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?
⁴⁰

What Douglass wanted from the South was not reconciliation but repentance for the attempted assassination of the republic by the slaveholding aristocrats. “The South has a past not to be contemplated with pleasure, but with a shudder,” he wrote in 1870. “She has been selling agony, trading in blood and in the souls of men. If her past has any lesson, it is one of repentance and thorough reformation.” More than a decade later, Douglass was still not satisfied: “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the
difference between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.”
⁴¹

In the case of Du Bois, the Beards, and those who have followed in their path, the Civil War approaches the nadir of total loss precisely because at some point they concluded that since liberal democracy was a dead end, an illusion, and never worth fighting for, intentionally or otherwise, the Civil War could never amount to more than a tragic failure. But because Americans in those same years strayed from the path they might have trod at the end of the war does not mean that the Civil War is merely a tragedy.

In 1886 the survivors of Battery B of the 1st New Jersey Artillery gathered together at Gettysburg with the other survivors of the 3rd Corps of the Army Potomac to stroll over the battlefield and visit the graves of the battery’s dead 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.”
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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 Whitman
⁴⁶

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 Eric Hobsbawm’s
The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848
(New York: World, 1962) and
The Age of Capital, 1848–1875
(New York: Scribner, 1975), and I have used Thomas Cochran’s
Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), Charles G. Sellers’s
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Marc Egnal,
Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), and, for examples of localized confrontations with the market economy, I have borrowed a number of incidents from Christopher Clark’s
The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). The politics of the Jacksonian era have been richly covered in Robert V. Remini’s three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson,
Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, Andrew Jackson and Course of American Freedom
, and
Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy
(New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 1981, 1984). Remini has also produced a biography of Jackson’s nemesis, Henry Clay, in
Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), and this has most recently been joined by David and Jeanne Heidler’s
Henry Clay: The Essential American
(New York: Random House, 2010). Whig political thinking has been superbly dissected by Daniel Walker Howe in
The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), while the Democrats have their remembrancers in Jean Baker,
Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983) and Marvin Meyer,
The Jacksonian Persuasion
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1957). The great Webster-Hayne debate over nullification can be best surveyed by the documents collected by Herman Belz in
The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union: Selected Documents
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000).