Why the Civil War?

Some interesting and thought-provoking posts have appeared in the blogosphere over the past week.  Harry Smeltzer at Bull Runnings asks "What is a 'Civil War Blog?,'" while Robert Moore at Cenantua's Blog poses the question, "Who are Civil War Bloggers?"  Craig Swain, who maintains To the Sound of the Guns, even looked at the on-line world of Civil War history before blogs.  These three excellent posts also beg another question, and one that I have been pondering for quite a while now:  Why the Civil War?

During a trip to Winchester, Virginia in May, I visited a few French and Indian War sites.  Then, at the start of July, I toured Lexington Green, Old North Bridge, and other places associated with the start of the American Revolution.  Yet on returning from both of these trips, I realized the dearth of blogs about the colonial and Revolutionary War period.  In contrast to the Civil War, which has stimulated more than 100 blogs, the French and Indian War and Revolution seem to have ignited very few on-line passions.  Moreover, around 60,000 books have been written about the Civil War, but the numbers are nowhere near comparable to most other periods of American military history.  Minute Man National Historical Park had only a handful of titles on the Revolution for sale.  Compare that to your average Civil War battlefield bookstore.  And who's really pumped about the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War or the 200th of the War of 1812 compared to the way that people are flocking to the Sesqui in all its permutations?  The entire Civil War has truly become a cottage industry, with everything from battle reenactments to collector plates. 

A scene from last year's reenactment commemorating the 150th anniversary of First Manassas.  The event drew over 18,000 spectators and nearly 7,000 reenactors despite temperatures hovering at over 100 degrees. 

Part of our fascination with the Civil War may stem from what was at stake.  The Revolution gave birth to our independence, but the very existence of the Republic was on the line in when war erupted at Ft. Sumter.  The United States would emerge a stronger country, or our Founding Fathers' great experiment in representative democracy and federalism would amount to nothing but an abject failure.  The war also became a struggle to destroy slavery and secure freedom for millions of African-Americans.  In a sense, the Civil War was fought to complete the unfinished work of the American Revolution.   The critical importance of the Civil War appeals to people in a way that other periods of American military history may not.  Perhaps only the fight against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan comes close.

The Civil War was also America's bloodiest conflict.  Recent research has indicated that the death toll may have reached a staggering 750,000.  Americans cannot turn their heads away from the killing and destruction that was the Civil War.  We are morbidly drawn to our nation's own fratricidal conflict.  We visit the battlefields where thousands of young men perished and ponder the cost of preserving the Union and ending slavery.  "How could Americans do this to one another?," we ask.  The tragedy virtually begs us to study and remember.

The Civil War also continues to touch people in very personal ways.  Many Americans have ancestors who fought on both sides of the war.  They research and even write about their family members' participation in the conflict.  They join the successor organizations to Union and Confederate veterans groups.  They tour the places where their relatives fought and died.  Of course, many people have family members who served in America's other armed conflicts, so perhaps this near obsession with our Civil War ancestors is a result, rather than the cause, of our intense interest in the war.

The war's vast impact left very few parts of mid-19th century America untouched.  The Civil War occupies a prominent part of the geographical space in many places across the United States.  The Revolution and other wars fought on American soil were more limited in their reach, and this country's foreign wars happened far from home.  Many Americans are literally surrounded by sites associated with the Civil War.  Memorials to the war's dead rise above courthouse squares.  Historical markers point out the importance of homes, roads, fields, and other landmarks.  Cemeteries contain the headstones of those who gave the last full measure of devotion.  For history-minded people, it's not easy to turn away from all of these local and regional connections to the war, particularly if you live down South. 

The Civil War may have occurred a long time ago, but that doesn't mean that the war is no longer part of our national discourse.  Politicians and pundits invoke concepts such as states' rights and secession.  Contemporary discussions of race relations sometimes focus on the legacy of slavery and emancipation.  And for better or for worse, Americans still like to debate the causes of the war.  The on-going controversies, picked up by the mainstream media, ensure that general attention to the war remains high.

The Civil War is sometimes called the "first modern war."  Railroads, telegraphs, ironclad gunboats, and other technologies saw wide-spread use during the war.  We are captivated by this transition to a newer and more recognizable form of warfare.  The Civil War was also one of the first conflicts to be extensively documented through photographs.  Americans feel a very real and visual connection to the Civil War in a way that we cannot with this country's earlier conflicts.

The myths and legends of the Civil War also make buffs and enthusiasts of many of us.  Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson loom larger-than-life in the Lost Cause version of events that survives on the screen and in literature.  I'll admit that I got hooked on the war when reading about the exploits of Confederate generals.  But the story does not end there.  In the same way that people may have gotten lured in by watching Gone with the Wind, there are those who trace their fascination to Glory and the 54th Massachusetts or Killer Angels and Joshua Chamberlain.

Maybe we can never really be certain why so many people are addicted to the Civil War.  I like to imagine it's something that is just programmed into the DNA of Civil War historians and enthusiasts alike.  Or perhaps the interest stems from the influences of some mystical, supernatural power.  After all, my mother was pregnant with me when she and my father visited Gettysburg in 1970!  (Spooky, I know.)  But all kidding aside, the Civil War speaks to many of us like no other conflict in U.S. history.  If the past is any guide, America's obsession with the Civil War will continue to dominate our culture in the years to come.

President Wilson: Looking at the South Through Rose-Colored Glasses

The other day Eric Wittenberg at Rantings of a Civil War Historian posted an insightful article from Time discussing slavery as the root cause of the Civil War, and how some Americans have tried to obscure this fact.  The article mentions that President Woodrow Wilson's book, A History of the American People, was "tinged with Lost Cause interpretations."  I decided to dig a little deeper and took my 1900 copy of another Wilson book, Division and Reunion: 1829-1889, off the shelf.  Wilson wrote this book when he was still a professor at Princeton University.  There is a lot there to discuss, but as we prepare to commemorate the start of the Civil War, I thought I'd share a few passages with readers that reveal a lot about how Wilson wanted Americans to remember the origins of the war and the secession of the Southern states.

It is no secret that Wilson, born before the war in Staunton, Virginia, held a romanticized view of the American South and the so-called fight against Yankee aggression.  Wilson spent his childhood in Virginia and Georgia.  His father, the Rev. Joseph Wilson, defended slavery from the pulpit and served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army.  Surely this upbringing played a part in forming Wilson's views.  As President, Wilson was far from enlightened on issues of race.  He oversaw segregation in the federal government and even screened D.W. Griffith's infamous film, The Birth of a Nation, at the White House.

Division and Reunion, Wilson's one-volume contribution to the three-volume Epochs of American History series, concentrates on events from the election of Andrew Jackson to end of Reconstruction and the establishment of a "New Union."  Wilson dedicates an entire part of the book to "The Slavery Question."  In this regard, Wilson did not go as far as some Lost Causers and deny the role slavery played in precipitating Civil War.  However, many of Wilson's views towards slavery go by the playbook.  Describing the "Conditions of Slave Life," Wilson remarked:

Slavery showed at its worst where it was most seen by observers from the North,—upon its edges. In the border States slaves were constantly either escaping or attempting escape, and being pursued and recaptured, and a quite rigorous treatment of them seemed necessary. There was a slave mart even in the District of Columbia itself, where Congress sat and northern members observed. But in the heart of the South conditions were different, were more normal. Domestic slaves were almost uniformly dealt with indulgently and even affectionately by their masters. Among those masters who had the sensibility and breeding of gentlemen, the dignity and responsibility of ownership were apt to produce a noble and gracious type of manhood, and relationships really patriarchal. . . .  "Field hands" on the ordinary plantation came constantly under their master's eye, were comfortably quartered, and were kept from overwork both by their own laziness and by the slack discipline to which they were subjected. They were often commanded in brutal language, but they were not often compelled to obey by brutal treatment. (pp. 125-26)

Discussing the climate of Northern hostility towards the South around the time of Lincoln's election, Wilson wants the reader to feel almost sorry for the slaveholding class:

The agitation against slavery had spoken in every quarter the harshest moral censures of slavery and the slaveholders. The whole course of the South had been described as one of systematic iniquity; southern society had been represented as built upon a wilful sin; the southern people had been held up to the world as those who deliberately despised the most righteous commands of religion. They knew that they did not deserve such reprobation. They knew that their lives were honorable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility for the existence of slavery among them remote. (pp. 208-09)

These types of passages demonstrate the Wilson was all too willing to downplay the evil of slavery, almost forty years after emancipation.  This view inverts the victim and victimizer, and sets up a construct to portray the South as justified in leaving the Union and taking up arms against a North set to destroy the Southern way of life.

President Woodrow Wilson (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Not surprisingly, Wilson finds a way to make secession look legally and morally acceptable.  He argues that the doctrine had longstanding roots going back to the start of the Republic, and that the South had stood firmly on principle in choosing to leave the Union, even if the rest of the country disagreed:

The legal theory upon which this startling and extraordinary series of steps was taken was one which would hardly have been questioned in the early of the government, whatever resistance might then have been offered to its practical execution. It was for long found difficult to deny that a State could withdraw from the federal arrangement, as she might have declined to enter it. But constitutions are not mere legal documents: they are the skeleton frame of a living organism; and in this case the course of events had nationalized the government once deemed confederate. . . . The South had not changed her ideas from the first, because she had not changed her condition. She had not experienced, except in a very slight degree, the economic forces which had created the great Northwest and nationalized the rest of the country; for they had been shut out from her life by slavery. . . .  There had been nothing active on the part of the South in this process. She had stood still while the rest of the country had undergone profound changes; and, standing still, she retained the old principles which had once been universal. Both she and her principles, it turned out, had been caught at last in the great national drift, and were to be overwhelmed. Her slender economic resources were no match for the mighty strength of the nation with which she had fallen out of sympathy. (pp. 211-12)

In some ways, it may seem strange to us that a highly educated professor at one of the nation's top universities -- and a future U.S. President -- espoused such a historical interpretation of slavery and secession. But America at that time had a long way to go before the Lost Cause school of thought fell into general disfavor, and Wilson was not exceptional in his views.

The Civil War at Oakwood-Ridgewood Elementary

Recently I started to think about my early Civil War education in fifth grade at Oakwood-Ridgewood Elementary School near Pittsburgh.  By the time I reached fifth grade in 1981, I had already been a "buff" for a couple of years.  My family even gave in to their young son's pleas to visit Gettysburg during the previous summer.

It probably is safe to say that I entered the classroom with more knowledge of the Civil War than a lot of fifth graders across the country, with the exception of Southern boys and girls who were raised on tales of the Lost Cause!  Of course, I still didn't know that much.  I guess you could say that I was young and impressionable.

What I find most fascinating after all these years is the relatively over-simplified and pro-Southern view I remember learning.  Some of this makes sense, given that we were fifth graders, and not history grad students.  But it doesn't explain why the Southern side seemed to figure so prominently in my education, particularly at a Northern school.  We were taught that the cause of the Civil War was states' rights; that Southern society was characterized by chivalry and honor; that Southern men were skilled horsemen and marksmen, and even better fighters; and that the South had the best generals.  Our teacher even entertained us by reading aloud from a book about a young soldier with Confederate General Wade Hampton's Legion.  A romanticized and sanitized version stuck with me for many years.  It was as if the Lost Cause had found its way across the Mason-Dixon line.  (In some ways it already had, looking at the early 80s popularity of the Dukes of Hazard and "The General Lee," with its Confederate flag and Dixie-tooting horn.)

"The General Lee"

Perhaps my memory is faulty.  After all, back in those days, I admired the Southern generals, whose dash and daring appealed to this boy's sense of adventure and imagination.  Maybe I liked rooting for the underdog, since I myself was sometimes picked on by the schoolyard bullies.  If I remember learning the Confederate side of things, it might just be my selective memory.  However, I can't help but think that this Catholic boy would have felt more guilt if I had learned the whole truth and continued to cheer for the Rebels.  Now, all these years later, my adult mind views the war and its causes quite differently, although I have to confess to still admiring the military skills of Lee and other Southern generals.

One of my childhood books. I remember reading this on my grandparents' front porch one summer.

I'd like to think that public schools are beyond teaching a view of the "War Between the States" that glosses over the hard issues.  I don't yet have kids in school, but I hope that they would learn a balanced, fair, and complete picture of the war, including a frank discussion of slavery and race, even in the fifth grade.   We can still teach that Lee was a brilliant general and that country boys from Dixie were better horsemen, but we can't forget to teach the truth about the system they fought to preserve and the threat that the Confederacy posed to our Constitution and our Union.

Interesting Article on Interpretive Traditions Regarding the Civil War

I thought readers might find this article from Civil War Times interesting, particularly in light of yesterday's posting on Lost Cause symbols in Alexandria.  Historian Gary Gallagher discusses the various interpretive traditions concerning the Civil War.  He argues that the Union Cause tradition is the most underappreciated interpretation in today's America.  I tend to agree. We have gone from one extreme (Lost Cause) to the other (Emancipation), while neglecting the ultimate importance of preserving the Union.  Recently, I watched Ken Burns' The Civil War and had the same reaction to the curious comment by Professor Barbara Fields on the issue of saving the Union. 

Pause to ask yourself a few questions.  They show the importance of Union to understanding and interpreting the Civil War and its consequences. What would have become of slaves in the Confederate states if the Union had not been preserved?  What would have been the world-wide impact if America's great experiment in representative democracy had failed?  Would the United States have become the global military and economic power it is today?  Let's give the Union Cause tradition the place it deserves in America's remembrance of the Civil War.

Old Glory flies once again over Fort Sumter, April 1865 (Library of Congress)

Symbols of the "Lost Cause" in Alexandria

Alexandria, a charming town outside of Washington, DC, is known as much for its chic boutiques and fine restaurants as for its colonial past.  Just below the surface, however, lie reminders that this town was once inhabited by Confederate sympathizers who resented Union occupation during the Civil War and sought to commemorate the so-called "Lost Cause" in the years following Appomattox.  One of the most striking symbols of this past is the statue of a Rebel soldier located at the intersection of S. Washington and Prince Streets.  The Sons of Confederate Veterans led the effort to erect this memorial to Alexandria's Confederate dead.  Dedicated in 1889 by Governor Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee and a former major general of cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia, the statue defiantly faces away from the nation's capital.  An 1890 act of the Virginia House of  Delegates prohibited the statue from being moved to another location.

Confederate Statue on S. Washington Street, Old Town

But there are other, more hidden signs, that tourists and residents walk past every day without ever taking notice.  Before eating at Jackson 20 the other day, I paused to snap a picture of a marker affixed to the Hotel Monaco on King Street.  The hotel is located on the site of the Marshall House, where on May 24, 1861 Union Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth of the 11th New York "Fire Zouaves" was shot to death by innkeeper James Jackson after having torn down the Stars and Bars flying from the roof.  Jackson in turn was killed on the spot by one of Ellsworth's men.  In the immediate aftermath of Ellsworth's death, the young colonel and friend of Lincoln became a martyr for the Northern cause.  The South exalted Jackson as a defender of property rights in the face of Yankee aggression. 

The marker on the Hotel Monaco, placed by the Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans, salutes Jackson as "the first martyr to the cause of Southern independence."  (The date the marker was affixed is uncertain, although it has survived the change in ownership from Holiday Inn to Hotel Monaco.)  I shouldn't have been surprised to find this memorial, but I was.  Even an incident like the murder of Ellsworth survived the war to stir passions and drive Southerners to honor the alleged "heroics" of an innkeeper who used excessive and deadly force to deal with the removal of a simple flag.

Killing of Ellsworth and the Marshall House as depicted in an 1861 edition of Harper's Weekly

Marker commemorating the death of James Jackson at the corner of King and Pitt Streets

The problems with the Lost Cause mythology are numerous and are well documented in the literature of Civil War memory.  At the same time, the placement of such markers and monuments in the aftermath of the Civil War helped the United States to begin the process of reconciling, however ironic that may seem.  Within a reunited nation, Southerners were allowed to honor their "Lost Cause," veterans, and war dead.  The North would look the other way and erect its own monuments.  Unfortunately and tragically, the African American experience, and civil rights for freed slaves and their descendants, were neglected in a rush to "bind up the nation's wounds."  It would take over a hundred years to truly bind those wounds, and even then, they are sometimes still very close to the surface.

So, what to do with these markers and monuments?  After all, these tributes are part of history, and when properly explained and placed in context, they tell a powerful story of how previous generations of Americans remembered and dealt with civil conflict.  They also stand in some instances to honor war dead, even if the soldiers died for the wrong reasons.  Rather than remove such vestiges of a past that some would rather condemn and forget, these monuments and markers of the Lost Cause should be viewed critically next to sites that represent other aspects of the Civil War-era experience in Alexandria.  The Freedom House Museum, located in a former slave pen on Duke Street, features exhibits on slavery in Alexandria and beyond.  The City of Alexandria runs the Alexandria Black History Museum, and the Alexandria National Cemetery contains the graves of over 200 U.S. Colored Troops who gave their lives in service to the Union.  (See here, here, and here).  Fort Ward Museum, on the outskirts of Old Town, explains what life was like for Union soldiers stationed in one of the numerous forts in Northern Virginia guarding the area around Washington.  Alexandria can tell a story about all Americans affected by the Civil War.  All that we need to do is look, listen, and reflect.