It Still Matters

Except .  .  . we were.

McPherson’s subtitle is Why the Civil War Still Matters. I opened the book two days before the massacre of nine black worshipers, in church, by a young white man who liked to photograph himself using what is known as “the Confederate flag” as a prop. The killing took place in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Civil War began when cannons fired on Fort Sumter.

And then there was that flag, which Confederate troops followed into the bloodiest battles in this nation’s history. It might be best to think of it as two flags: the one that troops followed ardently in the 19th century and the one that was flown to rally the segregationists of the 20th.

Of course the Civil War still matters. The frequently quoted line of William Faulkner’s is precisely appropriate here: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Still, one wonders, what accounts for the unyielding fascination a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox?

Several years ago, I put this question to Richard ­Ketchum, who was a neighbor and the author of many splendid books about the American Revolution. He had begun writing about the revolution when he was a young editor at American Heritage. One of his colleagues was Bruce Catton. As Ketchum told it, he and Catton went out to lunch one day and decided to divide up American history. He would take the revolution and Catton would take the Civil War.

“His books were bestsellers,” Ketchum said, sounding amused, “and mine were well reviewed.”

They were better than that, but the point stands. Assuming their books were of equal literary merit, one would, of course, expect Catton’s to be more widely read. But why?

“Photography has something to do with it,” Ketchum said. “There was no Mathew Brady at Saratoga or York­town. We have these very formal, lifeless paintings of Washington, which don’t compare to those haunting photographs of Lincoln, worn down by the war. Or of the dead, lying in the sunken road at Antietam.”

Ketchum had much more to say on this matter, but the point about photography struck me and stuck with me. The Civil War was a modern war. Modern in weaponry and tactics and, even, strategy. Rifled muskets made the old stand-up style of war obsolete, though some Civil War generals never really apprehended and acted upon this truth. Field fortifications yielded something that came to be known as “trench warfare,” which later ruined Europe, whose generals hadn’t bothered to study what the Americans had learned at great cost. And generals like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan went about defeating armies by smashing economies in a fashion of war that is especially modern. They lacked only airplanes.

So much about the American Civil War, then, was foreshadowing, and one reads those books about it with a sense of impending doom, like following the course of the Titanic as it bears down on the iceberg.

And then there are the numbers. Contemporary research and scholarship puts the total number of dead, from both sides, at something like 750,000. As McPherson writes, “To illustrate the immensity of that figure, it equals 2.4 percent of the American population in 1860. If 2.4 percent of Americans were to be killed in a war fought today, the number of war dead would be almost 7.5 million.”

The battle of Antietam, as he notes, remains the bloodiest single day in American history—more people killed and wounded than at Pearl Harbor, or on D-Day at Normandy, or on September 11. And Antietam was just one battle, lasting one day, and it ended, by the way, as something of a draw. The Civil War established that isolated, daylong battles would not be decisive in modern, total war.

If a single datum could capture the suffering and mayhem, there is this, from Shelby Foote’s afterword to his three-volume history, The Civil War, a Narrative: “During the first year of peace the state of Mississippi allotted a solid fifth of its revenues for the purchase of artificial arms and legs for its returning veterans.”

The numbers and the analytic history, however, are insufficient, I think, to account for the enduring fascination of the American Civil War. There is also what might be called the “literary” element. There was a tragic and epic inevitability about the Civil War. It seems impossible that it would not have been fought and that Lincoln’s “four score” was not all prelude. And then there was the way in which the war seemed almost to have been “written” with drama and suspense and pathos in the mind of the author. I toured Gettysburg, once, with a man who taught the subject at the Army War College, and one of his many insights was that, over and over, this battle came down to “not quite enough and just in time.”

There was nothing inevitable about Gettysburg, and one still experiences a feeling of suspense when reading about it. Will Buford hold out until Reynolds arrives? Will Ewell and Early find it “practicable” to take Cemetery Hill, as Lee put it in his orders? And that was just on the first day. On the second, the entire issue, and perhaps even the outcome of the war itself, came down to Little Round Top, where a hastily deployed unit from Maine, commanded by Joshua Chamberlain, repulsed the Alabamians trying to take it and did it with that rare thing in the Civil War, a bayonet charge.

And then, on the third day, there was the assault that history knows as Pickett’s Charge that reached the Union line but could not break it. The point at which the assault stalled and turned into a retreat came to be known as “the high-water mark of the Confederacy.”

Michael Shaara turned all this into his novel The Killer Angels, and one of the most interesting things about that book is that he didn’t have to make anything up. It was as though it had already been written by some much larger hand and Shaara then edited and shaped it, with a fine eye, to make it compelling to modern sensibilities.

There were, throughout the war, so many other moments of “just in time” and “not quite enough.” A. P. Hill arriving at Antietam after a hard march from Harper’s Ferry at almost the exact moment Lee’s line was breaking and might have been rolled up and crushed by the Union. Or when Thomas stood like a rock at Chickamauga. Or Jackson like a “stone wall” at Bull Run. The war seems, in the rearview mirror of history, dramatic, epic, and tragic on a scale that accounts for the language used by Douglas Southall Freeman in a thumbnail biography of Stonewall Jackson:

So the war was both epic and tragic. And the suffering may have been appropriate to the magnitude of the flaw—or sin, to be biblical—at its heart. Lincoln understood this when he said,

Of course, the next passage in the address is more widely remembered and quoted:

Terrible as the war was—and it was still going on when Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural and spoke those words—it is striking how eager some of those who fought it most fiercely were to put it behind both themselves and the country and to “bind up its wounds,” once the fighting was done. Among them Lincoln, of course, and it is fascinating and depressing to imagine how things might have gone if Booth—the original dead-ender—had failed at Ford’s Theatre.

But if the Civil War still matters to you and you read the histories, you will be struck by the magnanimity in victory of William Tecumseh Sherman, who was probably the Union general most hated by southerners. Sherman was a hard man who believed in hard war. But he wanted it hard so that it would be ended quickly and decisively, which would make reconciliation come sooner and more mercifully. Sherman offered terms to Joseph E. Johnston—who surrendered a few days after Lee—that were too generous for the secretary of war, who amended them. Sherman and Johnston became friends after the war, and Johnston died of pneumonia after serving, in the rain, as a pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral.

General Ulysses S. Grant wrote that after he had accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, he felt “sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”

And then there was Lee, who believed that the issue had been settled on the battlefield, and that his duty was now to do what he could to rebuild and restore. He had been a slaveholder and was perhaps repenting this sin when, during church services in Richmond after the war, a black man went to the altar to take communion and the members of the white congregation remained seated in the pews, leaving him there alone. The general rose and went down the aisle and knelt with the man.

Lee once said, “Before and during the War Between the States, I was a Virginian. After the war I became an American.” Still, his citizenship was not restored until 1975.

Ordinary soldiers, it seems, also wanted to give the war an honored place in memory that somehow worked to bury the hatreds as well. In one of history’s more improbable and touching reunions, over 50,000 veterans of the war returned to the scene of the Battle of Gettysburg 50 years later. The United States and Confederate flags flew side by side, and there was even a reenactment of the famous charge. This time, the assaulters started much closer to the stone wall at the top of Cemetery Ridge, and they carried walking canes instead of muskets. They managed a feeble rebel yell just before they reached the stone wall, where they shook hands with the Union men who were waiting there.

The men who attended that 1913 Gettysburg reunion knew that they had been a part of something very large in history. And that something had surely been settled. Nobody was going to fight that war again. But it still mattered. It also mattered that, fierce as the war had been, it had been fought largely without atrocity—Fort Pillow and a few similar incidents being the exception. In a conversation with Shelby Foote, I was struck when he said, “You know, it was a war without rape. I studied Sherman’s march very thoroughly and couldn’t find cases of rape. A lot of what is called ‘fraternization’ but no rape.”

It was, in some deeply paradoxical sense, a war between countrymen. And when it was done, and the right side had won, it was time to repair Lincoln’s “bonds of affection.” Those bonds had made the war both terrible and .  .  . something else.

There is an ineluctable quality about the Civil War that is the reason it still makes a difference. It is probably impossible to simplify that thing and get it into a few words. Or even, perhaps, a few million words.

Which explains why of the making of books—like Professor McPherson’s recent volume—there is no end.

Nor should there be.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.