The Transformation of the World (121 page)

Civil War in the United States

There can be nothing open in the verdict concerning the American Civil War.
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Of all the great midcentury conflicts within a society, it was the one in which the forces of moral and political progress were most unambiguously victorious. Their victory was also associated with the “conservative” goal of preserving a nation-state that already existed. Such was not the case in India or China. The Indian
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rebels and the small number of princes who supported them would certainly not have been able to replace the great integrative framework that the British military and governmental apparatus constituted in its way; no Indian Prussia would have emerged from the successful rebellion to unify the Subcontinent. Instead, the outcome most likely would have been another string of statelets like that of the eighteenth century. A China ruled by the Taiping would definitely not have been a liberal democracy (whatever Hong Reng'an may have planned): perhaps an authoritarian theocracy or, with the passing of time, a refurbished variant of the Confucian order minus the Manchu component would have emerged. But the Taiping movement was so fissiparous that it is hard to imagine the preservation of a unified empire. If nineteenth-century China had been able to develop into a plurality of nation-states, would they have been economically viable? We have reason to doubt it.

Matters are clearer in North America. The victory of the North in 1865 prevented the lasting formation of a third independent state in the region, destroying the institution that went together with everything conservative or reactionary in the American context of the time. The political coordinates of the United States were quite different from those of Europe. Those who stood on the right in the United States in 1850 or 1860 were not partisans of authoritarian rule, neoabsolutist monarchy, or aristocratic privilege; they were defenders of slavery. Should we consider the American Civil War under the heading “revolution,” as some contemporary observers did (e.g., Karl Marx or the young French journalist Georges Clemenceau)?
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American historians have debated the issue more than once since the 1920s; a comparative treatment adds another dimension to it.
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The same has been true of the Taiping movement. From a strictly Confucian viewpoint the participants were lawless bandits who deserved to be wiped out, whereas for later Sino-Marxists they were precursors of the revolution (not “bourgeois revolutionaries”) that really began only with the founding of the
Communist Party of China in 1921.
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But if we speak of the European events of 1848–49 as revolutionary, then the same ought to be said of the Taiping. Their revolution failed too. The social transformations they introduced were at least as radical as any that occurred in Europe in 1848–49. They did not build a lasting order, but they weakened key pillars of the old. The Chinese ancien régime collapsed in 1911, the central European régime not until 1918–19.

On a scale of violence and death, the American Civil War may be placed alongside only the much more violent Taiping Revolution; the events of 1848–49 in central Europe or 1857–58 in India pale in comparison. Even more than in other cases, a distinction must be drawn here between the revolutionary character of the causes and of the consequences. The immediate spur for the American Civil War was the development of two opposite interpretations of the US Constitution, the key symbolic bond that had held the Union together since 1787. In the preceding decades, tensions between the political elites in North and South had been mitigated by quite a robust two-party system that straddled regional (in America one would say sectoral) contradictions. This system polarized along regional lines in the 1850s: the Republicans stood for the North, the Democrats for the South. As soon as it became known that Abraham Lincoln, an opponent of slavery, had been elected president in late 1860, the champions of a new Southern nationalism began to put their program into practice. By the time of Lincoln's inauguration in January 1861, seven Southern states had already announced their exit, and in February a new Confederate States of America came into being and immediately proceeded to take over federal property on its territory. In his first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, Lincoln characterized the Southern action as secession and left no doubt that he would act to preserve the unity of the nation.
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War broke out on April 14, after the South had attacked Fort Sumter, a federal garrison on an island off the coast of South Carolina.

The causes of the conflict, debated among historians ever since, were not the typical ones of European revolutions. There was no revolt by socially and economically underprivileged classes—slaves, peasants, or workers. Nor, of course, was freedom from autocracy an issue, although Barrington Moore is right to argue that “striking down slavery was … an act at least as important as the striking down of absolute monarchy in the English Civil War and the French Revolution.”
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Both sides spoke tirelessly of liberty: the North wanted freedom for the slaves; the South, freedom to keep them.
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Whatever the background factors may have been (uneven economic development between North and South, clash of nationalist identities, inexperienced and overemotional handling of new political institutions, antagonism between an “aristocratic” South and a “bourgeois” North, etc.), the Civil War was not based on a European-style struggle for the rule of law. Rather, it was a postrevolutionary conflict, a follow-up to the earlier creation of a constitutional order. The fighting was not
for
a constitution but over the scope for different social models within an already existing
constitution. The cohesive nation defined in the Constitution of 1787 had been undermined by the divergence of regional interests.
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A readiness for war, eventually stretching well beyond the elites on either side, developed out of America's uncompleted eighteenth-century revolution, which had guaranteed white men their freedom but passed over the lack of freedom for Afro-American men.

As a series of events, the Civil War began when those who preferred this contradiction to be unresolved divided the unitary nation of the independence period and established a state of their own.
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The years of the conflict break down into several histories. One that can be told concerns how the South, despite great material inferiority, acquitted itself surprisingly well and fell back before the stronger North only in the middle of 1863. A second would tell of the mobilization of ever greater areas of society on both sides; and a third, of Abraham Lincoln's massive feat of leadership, which, if such a superlative is in order, made him one among the few political figures of the nineteenth century who rose to a challenge with both strategic farsightedness and tactical mastery. The war ended in April 1865 with the surrender of the last Confederate troops.
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The failed revolt by large sections of the Southern white population had consequences that may be called revolutionary. The separate Southern state and its military apparatus were smashed; Lincoln's Thirteenth Amendment enshrined the freedom of the slaves in the constitution of the whole country. The conversion of four million people without rights into US citizens must count as one of the deepest possible inroads into society, even if discrimination would long restrict its practical effect. The liberation of the African Americans marked the South and the mentality of its people for decades. True, the old elite of slave owners was not physically eliminated, but it lost its slave property without compensation and, immediately after the end of hostilities, found itself excluded from decisions about the postwar order. The victors did not inflict bloody vengeance on their leaders, as the Qing generals did on the Taiping rebels, the British on the Indian mutineers, or the Habsburg military on the defeated Hungarian insurgents of 1849. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, lost his citizenship, spent two years in prison, and died in poverty. Robert E. Lee, the military leader of the Southern states and perhaps the most brilliant of all the Civil War strategists, later became an advocate of reconciliation and ended up as the president of a university. Those were mild consequences for high treason. The South with its devastated landscapes and ruined cities—Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond were hit especially hard—was at first placed under military occupation. But this soon gave way to a new civil order, which under the successor of Abraham Lincoln (who was assassinated on April 15, 1865) was buttressed by a general amnesty covering nearly all former officeholders in the Confederacy.
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Everyone who lived in or, for whatever reason, moved to the South in the first few years after the war experienced it as a period of radical change. The erstwhile ruling class was dramatically weakened, war and abolition having stripped it of more than half of its assets. Before 1860 the plantation oligarchy of the South had
been wealthier than the economic elite of the North. After 1870 four-fifths of superrich Americans lived in the former states of the North.
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That emancipated slaves lost no opportunity to take their fate into their hands was itself something new;
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it had begun in the last two years of the Civil War. A total of 180,000 African Americans had served in the armies of the North, whereas unrest among the Southern slaves had grown with each military defeat of the Confederacy. In the situation opened up by the end of the war, various social groups fought for a position in the new order, now using legislative means rather than the force of arms: owners of the disintegrating large plantations, white farmers who had used little or no slave labor in the past, freedmen from the period before 1865, and former slaves. This happened in the framework of Northern-led “Reconstruction.”

The federal drive for reforms in the South reached a climax in 1867–72: the age of radical reconstruction. It promoted greater political participation, whittling down the power of the old Southern oligarchs, but it left their social and economic position intact on the large plantations. By 1877 at the latest, the Republican Party gave up its attempts to impose a new distribution of power and came to an arrangement with the elite of the Southern states (one of the great placatory compromises of the age, along with the Austro-Hungarian “settlement” of 1867 and the welding together of the German Reich in 1871 out of the former princely states). But there was no going back to the conditions before 1865, and in this sense the turn may be described as revolutionary. The presence of African Americans in elected office at nearly every political level would have been inconceivable in 1860. On the other hand, the black population was not enabled to take real advantage of the new opportunities. Political emancipation did not go hand in hand with social and economic emancipation, and among most whites it did not lead to changed attitudes that cast aside racially motivated persecution and discrimination.
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The Civil War, then, remained an “unfinished revolution.”
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Hopes of a greater political role for women (of all colors) were also disappointed. However, many historians have described as revolutionary certain other impulses that flowed out of the 1860s and 1870s. After decades of far-reaching laissezfaire, the government—especially at the federal level—took on a more active role and greater responsibilities: construction of a state banking system that imposed unity on previously chaotic monetary conditions; a turn to protective tariffs (that is, an assertive foreign-trade policy, which the United States pursues to this day); greater government investment in infrastructure; and stricter regulation of westward expansion. This “American system,” as it was called, was an important political prerequisite for the rise of the United States as the leading economic power. All this becomes apparent only if the Civil War and Reconstruction are taken as a single period stretching from 1861 to 1877,
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just as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era must be seen as a continuum from 1789 to 1815.

4 Eurasian Revolutions, Fin de Siècle

A Side Glance at Mexico

The third quarter of the nineteenth century was, with the relative exception of Africa, a period of great crises, many of them resolved through violence. Revolutionary challenges to the existing order began in 1847 in Western Europe and ended in 1873 with the crushing defeat of the last major Muslim revolts in southwestern China, due to both ethnic and religious tensions.
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The largest European wars between 1815 and 1914, from Crimea to Sedan, fall within that time span. After the convulsions, many countries in the world entered almost simultaneously a phase of state consolidation, which in certain cases took the special form of the construction of a nation-state. Finally, in 1917, revolutionaries of a new kind triumphed in Russia, seeing revolution as a process that spreads across borders—as world revolution. With the founding of the Communist International in 1919, attempts began to help it along by sending out emissaries and providing military assistance. This was a new development in the history of revolutions. In the nineteenth century only anarchists had tried anything similar; the best-known of them, Mikhail Bakunin, seemed to appear at every crisis point in Europe, though neither he nor others achieved any results. The export of revolution, not borne as after 1792 by conquering armies, was a novelty of the twentieth century. Characteristically, the last great revolutionary event in Europe before 1917—the Paris Commune of 1871—had remained completely isolated, not conforming to the conflagrative pattern of 1830 and 1848. It was a local interlude, grown out of the Franco-Prussian War. What it did show was that more than eighty years after the Great Revolution, French society was not yet at peace.

In such a bird's-eye perspective, one may easily overlook some “minor” revolutions that seemed to lie on “the periphery,” and of which one cannot really say whether they failed or succeeded by European standards. They all occurred in the period between 1905 and 1911, and were less spectacularly violent than the midcentury convulsions. The exception is the Mexican Revolution, which occupied the whole decade between 1910 and 1920; the whole of the twenties would be needed to contain its effects. Here revolution soon turned into civil war, passing through a number of phases and claiming the lives of one in eight Mexicans: a terrible toll in the history of revolutions, comparable only to the Taiping uprising in eastern China.
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The Mexican Revolution was a “great revolution” in the French sense. It had a broad social base, being essentially a peasant uprising but also much more besides. It overwhelmed an ancien régime—not in this case an absolute monarchy but an ossified oligarchy—and replaced it with a “modern” one-party system that survived until the year 2000.