The Journal of the Civil War Era

I am delighted to be here tonight to receive the Tom Watson Brown Book Prize for The Union War. Few things could be more satisfying than to receive such an honor from the principal professional organization in my field. I look around and see how far the society has come since its origins—a testament to the vitality of Civil War–era scholarship. I’ll express thanks at the outset to the Watson-Brown Foundation—and more particularly to Tad Brown—for this dinner, and to the Society of Civil War Historians and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University for overseeing the myriad details relating to the prize and tonight’s program.

Because I first felt the siren call of the Civil War as a ten-year-old at the outset of the centennial commemoration, I chose to revisit that time for my talk tonight. I went to National Geographic’s coverage in 1961–63 and in 2011–12 in search of comparative insights. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some interpretive emphases remain about the same, others—more important ones—do not. Both the early 1960s and the early twenty-first century underscore how, in their long relationships with the memory of the Civil [End Page 295] War, every generation of Americans has found what suits its needs and overlooked or marginalized things that do not. Our current preoccupation with race, as a profession and a society, is much in evidence as we navigate the sesquicentennial.

I can date my lifelong engagement with the war to an article titled “The Civil War” in the April 1961 issue of National Geographic. Written by Ulysses S. Grant III, it struck a reconciliationist tone reminiscent of the speeches Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered on the fiftieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries of the battle of Gettysburg. “Our forefathers fought to the limit of endurance for four years;” observed the preeminent Union military hero’s grandson, “when the echo of the last shot died away, they saw in the unity of their land something that overshadowed the bitterness of the struggle.” Out of the unimaginable carnage of the Civil War, continued Grant, “emerged a more firmly united country—a country that has become the leader of the Free World.”¹

Just more than two years later, in July 1963, National Geographic recalled the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in an issue featuring an essay by Carl Sandburg, the poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg alluded to “little American burgs named for long-forgotten settlers, Gettys and Vick . . . towns with no special claim to be noted or long remembered, till events wrote them red for all time as the turning point in the Civil War.” Lincoln’s address in November 1863 further sanctified the ground at Gettysburg: “No wonder,” reflected Sandburg, “that—100 years later—we honor the great events that made us not a parcel of quarreling states, but a united Nation.”²

For anyone who might worry that Gettysburg no longer gets sufficient attention as the war’s great turning point, I am happy to say that National Geographic offers comfort. A beautiful map inserted in the May 2012 issue pronounces 1863 to be the “Turning Point of the Civil War,” and accompanying text explains that “the Union began to gain the upper hand only in July 1863 with its victory at Gettysburg, the largest battle ever fought in North America.” Thus does National Geographic sustain a hoary distortion regarding Gettysburg’s preeminence—a distortion propped up by Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War, and Ron Maxwell’s Gettysburg, the four-hour cinematic translation of The Killer Angels. Thanks to Shaara, Burns, and Maxwell, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain now enjoys a position in the front rank of Union heroes—something William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan, I think it safe to say, might find odd.³

Recent issues of National Geographic also mirror the most obvious—and noteworthy—change in popular understanding of the conflict between [End Page 296] the centennial and the sesquicentennial. A map from the April 2005 issue, titled “A Nation Transformed by War,” places slavery and emancipation at the absolute center of the conflict.⁴ This surely had not been the case during the centennial, when reconciliation and the Lost Cause were most in evidence, and it underscores the degree to which a vast body of scholarship that followed in the wake of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s has brought seismic change to the field of Civil War studies. The experiences of black people, the process of emancipation, and the ways in which attitudes toward race affected actors and events have inspired myriad influential books and articles—thereby reversing decades of scholarly neglect in the earlier twentieth century.

The importance of slavery and race dominates interpretive pieces in popular magazines and newspapers relating to the war’s 150th anniversary. I will offer two examples. In April 2011, Time published an issue that featured Lincoln, with a large tear spilling out of his right eye, on the cover. The main article, titled “The Way We Weren’t,” affirms that “North and South shared the burden of slavery, and after the war, they shared in forgetting about it. But 150 years later, it’s time to tell the truth.” That same month, Jon Meacham, two years beyond his Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Andrew Jackson, contributed an article to Parade. “We must remember our nation’s history fully, not selectively,” he states. “If we truly want to be faithful stewards of the past, Americans need to recall what the war was about: slavery and the definition of human liberty. And the Civil War’s true legacy is not about Big Government or today’s political skirmishing—it’s about a nation’s obligation to live up to the best part of itself. Slavery was an evil, and it had to be defeated. As we reflect on the war, let us never forget that it was fought to rid us of a monumental prejudice and that we must remain vigilant about confronting inequality in our time.”⁵

These two pieces reflect the powerful stream of recent scholarship that, in my view, has produced a paradoxical result—and which prompted me to write The Union War. On the positive side, this literature, which builds on foundational titles from the 1970s and 1980s, leaves no doubt that slavery-related issues must be an essential part of any exploration of the Civil War (the longest chapter in The Union War deals with emancipation). On the negative side, it masks the fact that race and emancipation did not preoccupy the mass of loyal citizens in the United States—and in doing so tells us more about what we consider important than about what animated the wartime populace. This scholarship casts emancipation as the greatest outcome of the conflict, argues that it alone justified the awful human and material carnage, insists that soldiers and civilians in the United States recognized this, and locates the seeds of slavery’s destruction—an outcome [End Page 297] that often assumes a triumphalist sense of inevitability—very early in the war.

What this interpretation does not illuminate is the immense importance of the concept of Union. And without a firm understanding of the importance of Union within a mid-nineteenth-century context, I believe it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the Civil War era.

I will use a pair of recent works to illustrate the degree to which emancipation has trumped Union as an analytical lens through which historians examine the conflict. Adam Goodheart observes in 1861: The Civil War Awakening, a widely read and enthusiastically reviewed volume, that it is “intellectually fashionable to deprecate the Union cause, at least so far as it relates to slavery and race: to point out the casual racism of everyone from lowly infantryman up to President Lincoln himself; to say that that the Emancipation Proclamation was simply a convenient military stratagem; to repeat the truism that the Civil War began not as a war to abolish slavery but as a war to save the Union.” Then Goodheart asserts that we do not have to make do with such unfashionable explanations. “Men and women at the time, on both sides of the conflict, did understand it as a war against slavery, even before it began. This is clear from what they said and wrote.” Goodheart describes the war as a revolution that began “years before the first guns opened, as a gradual change in the hearts and minds of men and women, until suddenly, in the months before the attack on Sumter, this transformation attained irresistible momentum.”⁶

James Oakes’s Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 specifically addresses the relative importance of Union and emancipation. “I always believed that the purpose of the war shifted ‘from Union to emancipation,’” writes Oakes, “but over the course of my research that familiar transition vanished like dust in the wind, and I have been unable to recover it. Republicans did not believe that the Constitution allowed them to wage a war for any ‘purpose’ other than the restoration of the Union, but from the very beginning they insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensible means of suppressing it.” Republicans “never had to move from Union to emancipation,” adds Oakes, “because the two issues—liberty and union—were never separate for them. If there was a shift over the course of the war, it was the realization by Republicans that destroying slavery would be much harder than they had originally expected.”⁷

These quotations—and much of the recent literature—can be reassuring in suggesting an inevitable end to slavery. We should do our best to resist that tempting notion. We also should be very careful in how we interpret [End Page 298] words from the nineteenth century. For example, should we take the wartime generation’s use of “liberty” to mean they were talking about slavery and emancipation? And what about “freedom”—as deployed by Lincoln at Gettysburg and in innumerable other instances? Would Americans at the time automatically have inferred that “a new birth of freedom” had to do with black people and emancipation? The answer to both my questions is no. Liberty and freedom, for millions of white people (the free states were 98.8 percent white in 1860), had to do with the legacy of the founders that guaranteed ordinary citizens a role in their own governance and the opportunity to rise economically. They had to do, in the most fundamental sense, with the promise and value of the Union.

The song Battle Cry of Freedom highlights the need to be very careful in ascribing meanings to words. Composed in the summer of 1862, George F. Root’s immensely popular work often is tied to ending slavery. “By the time of the Gettysburg Address, in November 1863,” writes James M. McPherson in the book that took its title from Root’s composition, “the North was fighting for a ‘new birth of freedom’ to transform the Constitution written by the founding fathers . . . into a charter of emancipation for a republic where, as the northern version of ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom’ put it, ‘Not a man shall be a slave.’” But Root himself located his inspiration for the song in Lincoln’s call, on July 1, 1862, for the governors of loyal states to supply three hundred thousand three-year volunteers. “I heard of President Lincoln’s second call for troops one afternoon while reclining on a lounge in my brother’s house,” Root recalled in his memoirs, and “immediately I started a song in my mind.” Root envisioned a “rallying song” that would boost volunteering across the United States through the stirring message that opened the chorus: “The Union forever, Hurrah, boys, Hurrah!” Root’s lyrics brilliantly engaged all segments of the loyal states’ pool of military-age white men—“free men,” as Root denominated them, who by taking up arms would guarantee continued “freedom” and prevent their becoming slaves to southern slaveholders. These words appealed on the basis of a free labor vision of the American nation—of the Union—with a Constitution and representative form of government, to quote Lincoln, designed “to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”⁸

Untold loyal citizens believed that a failure to save the Union would scuttle the hard and bloody work of the Revolutionary generation and, beyond the North American continent, imperil the future of democracy in a western world dominated by oligarchs and monarchists. When Lincoln called the nation “the last best, hope of earth,” he did so with an affirming rather than a didactic purpose.⁹ The people of the loyal states, he knew [End Page 299] very well, already possessed a deep-seated belief in American exceptionalism as a democratic beacon and a bastion of self-government and individual opportunity.

First to last, the mass of loyal citizens identified Union as the war’s great goal. They said this in 1861; they said it again in 1865. Republican congressman Roscoe Conkling struck a very common note on June 18, 1865, in a speech to members of the 117th New York Infantry, who had stopped in Utica on their way home from service in Virginia and North Carolina. He congratulated the “victorious soldiers of the Republic” for their role in defending “the life and glory of your country. . . . In all this career of glory, of duty, and of daring exploit, a common purpose has inspired you, a common hope has led you on. What was it? Peace. Peace with the Government and the constitution our fathers established, has been the object of the war, and the prayer of every patriot and every soldier.” The regimental historian, writing immediately after the end of the war, pronounced Conkling’s remarks “appropriate and eloquent.”¹⁰

No one better understood the bedrock appeal of Union across the loyal states than Abraham Lincoln, who as late as December 1864, after he and the Republicans had vanquished Democrats in the November elections, offered this in his annual message to Congress: “In a great national crisis, like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable—almost indispensable. . . . In this case the common end is the maintenance of the Union.” The proposed thirteenth amendment, which the ballots in November proved to be favored by the electorate, stood, in Lincoln’s words, “among the means to secure that end.”¹¹

For most of the white North, emancipation was just what Lincoln suggested in his effort to court wide support for the war—a means to the greater end of Union. Apart from the small number of abolitionists and some Radical Republicans, white citizens, including many Democrats inside and some outside the army, embraced emancipation for three reasons. Killing slavery would help defeat the Confederacy. It would punish slaveholding oligarchs who had precipitated war in the first place. And it would remove the only internal factor anyone could imagine threatening the Union going forward. All these reasons had to do with Union—restoring it and making it safe in the future—rather than with mounting a great moral crusade to destroy a hateful institution and help African Americans. In his massive biography of Lincoln, Michael Burlingame observes that the president “was a martyr to black civil rights, as much as Martin Luther King” and other figures of the 1950s and 1960s. However much Burlingame’s observation might resonate with Americans in 2012, in April 1865 the overwhelming majority of loyal citizens would have described [End Page 300] their slain president as a martyr to Union rather than to emancipation or black equality.¹²

At the end of the war, with the Union salvaged and emancipation accomplished, most loyal citizens believed they had taken care of everything. There was no groundswell of support for doing more, for pursuing equal social and political rights for freedpeople, for maintaining a massive military presence in the former Confederacy. Understanding the degree to which loyal citizens considered Union the primary focus of the war renders the story of Reconstruction intelligible. There was no lost moment of possible racial accommodation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments grew out of intransigence among former Confederates, whose actions in the summer of 1865 and thereafter deeply offended those who celebrated the sacrifice of more than 360,000 U.S. soldiers to save the Union. Put another way, for most of the loyal citizenry emancipation marked the end of a story featuring issues relating to slavery as a corrosive dimension of political life—not the beginning of a story that would move on to achieve full racial equality. For them, the real beginning was for a newly restored nation, an emerging economic colossus liberated from the sectionalism that long had threatened the work of the Founders.

As a profession, we normally scorn Whiggish interpretations or teleological trappings. We also deplore navel-gazing frameworks that fail to place American history within a more spacious world context. I find it fascinating that much recent literature can lead to a sense that emancipation was an inevitable outcome rooted in the conflict’s earliest episodes, a long-deferred step toward fulfilling the promise of the nation’s foundational documents. It is a striking example of the Appomattox syndrome, of beginning analysis with knowledge of Union victory and emancipation and working backward to chart the road toward these achievements. In fact, the Confederacy could have won independence, or the war could have ended with Union victory and slavery largely intact—the latter scenario, indeed, nearly played out in the spring and early summer of 1862. As late as the incomprehensibly awful summer of 1864, virtually no one in the United States would have said victory was inevitable, and emancipation’s certainty would have come as a great surprise to more than 3 million black people still enslaved in the Confederacy.

As for the war’s most important outcome, survival of the nation dwarfed all others. Emancipation loomed largest for approximately 15 percent of the American population, whose emergence from what Frederick Douglass called the “hell-black system of human bondage” marked one of the great watersheds in our history.¹³ But emancipation was a largely internal phenomenon that had almost no effect on the actions or standing of [End Page 301] the United States on the world stage. For Europeans especially, as well as for others around the globe, the war’s greatest legacy was a nation that by 1900 boasted the world’s largest economy, was joining the ranks of major imperial powers, and would, throughout the twentieth century, wield unmatched economic, military, and diplomatic power.

I’ll close by saying, once more, that I wrote The Union War as a response to an interpretive trend that, in my view, suits our purposes in the early twenty-first century but does not necessarily reveal that much about the actual war. The need to find a usable and affirming past always is present, always will be. And there is nothing wrong with that approach to history—so long as it does not so obscure crucial realities of events as complex and important as the American Civil War.